---

THE ANCIENT

BRONZE IMPLEMENTS,

WEAPONS, AND ORNAMENTS,

OF

GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND.

---

THE ANCIENT
BRONZE IMPLEMENTS,
WEAPONS, AND ORNAMENTS,
OF
GREAT BRITAIN
AND
IRELAND.

BY
JOHN EVANS, D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S.,
F.S.A., F.G.S., Pres. Num. Soc., &c.

LONDON:
LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO.
1881.

(All rights reserved.)

---

[iv]

LONDON
PRINTED BY VIRTUE AND CO., LIMITED
CITY ROAD.

---

PREFACE.

The work which is now presented to the public has unfortunately been many years in progress, as owing to various occupations, both private and public, the leisure at my command has been but small, and it has been only from time to time, often at long intervals, that I have been able to devote a few hours to its advancement. During this slow progress the literature of the subject, especially on the Continent, has increased in an unprecedentedly rapid manner, and I have had great difficulty in at all keeping pace with it.

I have, however, done my best, both by reading and travel, to keep myself acquainted with the discoveries that were being made and the theories that were being broached with regard to bronze antiquities, whether abroad or at home, and I hope that so far as facts are concerned, and so far as relates to the present state of information on the subject, I shall not be found materially wanting.

Of course in a work which treats more especially of the bronze antiquities of the British Islands, I have not felt bound to enlarge more than was necessary for the sake of comparison on the corresponding antiquities of other countries. I have, however, in all cases pointed out such analogies in form and character as seemed to me of importance as possibly helping to throw light on the source whence our British bronze civilisation was derived.

It may by some be thought that a vast amount of useless trouble has been bestowed in figuring and describing so many varieties of what were after all in most cases the ordinary tools of the artificer, or the common arms of the warrior or huntsman, which differed from each other only in apparently unimportant particulars. But as in biological studies minute anatomy often affords the most trustworthy evidence as to the descent of any given organism[vi] from some earlier form of life, so these minor details in the form and character of ordinary implements, which to the cursory observer appear devoid of meaning, may, to a skilful archæologist, afford valuable clues by which the march of the bronze civilisation over Europe may be traced to its original starting-place.

I am far from saying that this has as yet been satisfactorily accomplished, and to my mind it will only be by accumulating a far larger mass of facts than we at present possess that comparative archæology will be able to triumph over the difficulties with which its path is still beset.

Much is, however, being done, and I trust that so far as the British Isles are concerned, the facts which I have here collected and the figures which I have caused to be engraved will at all events form a solid foundation on which others may be able to build.

So long ago as 1876 I was able to present to the foreign archæologists assembled at Buda-Pest for the International Congress of Prehistoric Archæology and Anthropology, a short abstract of this work in the shape of my Petit Album de l’âge du Bronze de la Grande Bretagne, which I have reason to believe has been found of some service. At that time my friend the late Sir William Wilde was still alive, and as the bronze antiquities of Ireland appeared to be especially under his charge, I had not regarded them as falling within the scope of my book. After his lamented death there was, however, no possibility of interfering with his labours, by my including the bronze antiquities of the sister country with those of England, Wales, and Scotland in the present work, and I accordingly enlarged my original plan.

In carrying out my undertaking I have followed the same method as in my work on the “Ancient Stone Implements, &c., of Great Britain;” and it will be found that what I may term the dictionary and index of bronze antiquities is printed in smaller type than the more general descriptive and historical part of the book. I have in fact offered those who take an ordinary interest in archæological inquiry without wishing to be burdened with minute details a broad hint as to what they may advantageously skip. To the specialist and the local antiquary the portion printed in smaller type will be found of use, if only as giving references to other works in which the more detailed accounts of local discoveries are given. These references, thanks to members of my own family, have been carefully checked, and the accuracy[vii] of all the original figures for this work, engraved for me with conscientious care by Mr. Swain, of Bouverie Street, may, I think, be relied on.

To the councils of several of our learned societies, and especially to those of the Societies of Antiquaries of London and Edinburgh, the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Archæological Institute, and the Royal Historical and Archæological Association of Ireland, I am much indebted for the loan of woodcuts and for other assistance. I have also to thank the trustees and curators of many local museums, as well as the owners of various private collections, for allowing me to figure specimens, and for valuable information supplied.

My warmest thanks are, however, due to Mr. Augustus W. Franks, F.R.S., and Canon Greenwell, F.R.S., not only for assistance in the matter of illustrations, but for most kindly undertaking the task of reading my proofs. I must also thank Mr. Joseph Anderson, the accomplished keeper of the Antiquarian Museum at Edinburgh, and Mr. Robert Day, F.S.A., of Cork, for having revised those portions of the work which relate to Scotland and Ireland.

The Index has been carefully compiled by my sister, Mrs. Hubbard. As was the case with those of my “Ancient Stone Implements,” and “Ancient British Coins,” it is divided into two parts; the one referring generally to the subject matter of the book, and the other purely topographical. The advantages of such a division in a book of this character are obvious.

In conclusion, I venture to prefer the request that any discoveries of new types of instruments or of deposits of bronze antiquities may be communicated to me.

John Evans.

Nash Mills, Hemel Hempsted,

March, 1881.

---

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
	PAGE
The Succession of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages—A Copper Age in America—Scriptural Notices of Bronze—Bronze preceded Iron in ancient Egypt—Bronze in ancient Greece—The Metals mentioned by Homer—Iron in ancient Greece—Bronzes among other ancient Nations—Use of Iron in Gaul and Italy—Disputes as to the three Periods—The Succession of Iron to Bronze—The Preservation of ancient Iron	1
CHAPTER II.
CELTS.
Origin of the word Celt—Views of early Antiquaries—Conjectures as to the Use of Celts—Opinions of modern Writers	27
CHAPTER III.
FLAT AND FLANGED CELTS.
Flat Celts from Cyprus and Hissarlik—Discoveries of Flat Celts in Barrows—Those ornamented on the Faces—Flanged Celts—Those from Arreton Down—And from Barrows—Decorated Flanged Celts—Flat Celts found in Scotland—Decorated Scottish Specimens—Flat Celts found in Ireland—Decorated Irish Specimens—Character of their Decorations—Flat Celts with Lateral Stops	39
CHAPTER IV.
WINGED CELTS AND PALSTAVES.
Origin of the term Palstave—Celts with a Stop-ridge—Varieties of Winged Celts—Transitional Forms—Palstaves with Ornaments on Face—With Central Rib on the Blade—Shortened by Wear—With a Transverse Edge—Looped Palstaves—With Ribs on Blade—With Shield-like Ornaments—With Vertical Ribs on Blade—With semicircular Side-wings hammered over—Iron Palstaves imitated from Bronze—Palstaves with two Loops—Scottish Palstaves—Irish Palstaves—Looped Irish Palstaves—Irish Palstaves with Transverse Edge—Comparison with Continental Forms	70
CHAPTER V.
SOCKETED CELTS.
Terms, “the Recipient” and “the Received”—Evolution from Palstaves—With [x]“Flanches,” or curved Lines, on the Faces—Plain, with a Beading round the Mouth—Of a Gaulish type—With vertical Ribs on the Faces—With Ribs ending in Pellets—With Ribs and Pellets on the Faces—With Ribs and Ring Ornaments—Variously ornamented—Of octagonal Section—With the Loop on one Face—Without Loops—Of diminutive Size—Found in Scotland—Found in Ireland—Comparison with Foreign Forms—Mainly of Native Manufacture in Britain—Those formed of Iron	107
CHAPTER VI.
METHODS OF HAFTING CELTS.
The perforated Axes of Bronze—Celts in Club-like Handles—Their Hafts, as seen in Barrows—Hafting after the manner of Axes—Socketed Celts used as Hatchets—Hafted Celt found at Chiusi—Hafts, as seen at Hallstatt—Celts in some instances mounted as Adzes—No perforated Axe-heads in Britain—Hafting Celts as Chisels	146
CHAPTER VII.
CHISELS, GOUGES, HAMMERS, AND OTHER TOOLS.
Simple form of Chisel rare—Tanged Chisels—Chisels with Lugs at sides—Socketed Chisels—Tanged Gouges—Socketed Gouges—Socketed Hammers—Irish Hammers—Method of Hafting Hammers—French Anvils—Saws and Files almost unknown in Britain—Tongs and Punches—The latter used in Ornamenting—Awls, Drills, or Prickers frequently found in Barrows—Awls used in Sewing—Tweezers—Needles—Fish-hooks	165
CHAPTER VIII.
SICKLES.
Method of Hafting—Sickles with Projecting Knobs—With Sockets—Sickles found in Scotland and Ireland—Found on the Continent	194
CHAPTER IX.
KNIVES, RAZORS, ETC.
The Socketed Form—Scottish and Irish Knives—Curved Knives—Knives with broad Tangs—With Lanceolate Blades—Of peculiar Types—Double-edged Razors—Scottish and Irish Razors—Continental Forms	204
CHAPTER X.
DAGGERS AND THEIR HILTS.—RAPIER-SHAPED BLADES.
Tanged Knives or Daggers—Knife-Daggers with three Rivets—Method of Hafting Daggers—Bone Pommels—Amber Hilt inlaid with Gold—Hilts with numerous Rivets—Inlaid and Ivory Hilts—Hilts of Bronze—Knife-Daggers with five or six Rivets—Knife-Daggers from Scotland—From Ireland—Daggers with Ornamented Blades—With Mid-ribs—With Ogival Outline—Rapier-shaped Blades—Rapiers with Notches at the Base—With Ribs on the Faces—Rapiers with Ox-horn and Bronze Hilts—Bayonet-like Blades	222
CHAPTER XI.
TANGED AND SOCKETED DAGGERS OR SPEAR-HEADS, HALBERDS, AND MACES.
Arreton Down type of Spear-heads—With Tangs and with Socket—Scandinavian and German Halberds—The Chinese Form—Irish Halberds—Copper Blades less brittle than Bronze—Broad Irish Form—Scottish Halberds—English and Welsh Halberds—The Form known in Spain—Maces, probably Mediæval	257
CHAPTER XII.[xi]
LEAF-SHAPED SWORDS.
Their Occurrence in British Barrows not authenticated—Occur with Interments in Scandinavia—The Roman Sword—British Swords—Disputes as to their Age—Hilts proportional to Blades—Swords with Central Slots in Hilt-plate—With many Rivet-holes—With Central Rib on Blade—Representation of Sword on Italian Coin—Those with Hilts of Bronze—Localities where found—Comparison with Continental Types—Swords found in Scotland—In Ireland—In France—Swords with Hilts of Bone—Decorated with Gold—Continental Types—Early Iron Swords	273
CHAPTER XIII.
SCABBARDS AND CHAPES.
Sheaths with Bronze Ends—Wooden Sheaths—Bronze Sheaths—Ends of Sword-Sheaths or Scabbard Ends—Chapes from England and Ireland—Spiked Chapes—Mouth-pieces for Sheaths—Ferrules on Sword-Hilts	301
CHAPTER XIV.
SPEAR-HEADS, LANCE-HEADS, ETC.
Different Types—Leaf-shaped—With a Fillet along the Midrib—Ornamented on the Sockets—With Loops at the Sides—From Ireland—Decorated on the Blade—With Loops at the Base of the Blade—Of Cruciform Section near the Point—With Openings in the Blade—With Flanges at the Side of the Openings—With Lunate Openings in the Blade—Barbed at the Base—Ferrules for Spear-shafts—African Spear Ferrules—Continental Types—Early Iron Spear-heads	310
CHAPTER XV.
SHIELDS, BUCKLERS, AND HELMETS.
Shields with numerous raised Bosses—With Concentric Ribs—With Concentric Rings of Knobs—Shields found in Scotland—In England and Wales—Wooden Bucklers—The Date of Circular Bucklers—Bronze Helmets—Their Date	343
CHAPTER XVI.
TRUMPETS AND BELLS.
Trumpets found in Ireland—Trumpets with Lateral Openings—The Dowris Hoard—Riveted Trumpets—The Caprington Horn—Trumpets found in England—Bells found in Ireland	357
CHAPTER XVII.
PINS.
Pins with Flat Heads—With Crutched Heads—With Annular Heads—Those of large Size—With Spheroidal Heads—With Ornamental Expanded Heads—From Scotland—From Denmark—Their Date difficult to determine	365
CHAPTER XVIII.
TORQUES, BRACELETS, RINGS, EAR-RINGS, AND PERSONAL ORNAMENTS.
The Gaulish Torque—Gold Torques—Funicular Torques—Ribbon Torques—Those of the Late Celtic Period—Penannular Torques and Bracelets—Bracelets engraved with Patterns—Beaded and Fluted—Looped, with Cup-shaped Ends—Late Celtic Bracelets—Rings—Rings with others cast on them—Coiled Rings found with Torques—Finger-rings—Ear-rings—Those of Gold—Beads of Tin—Of Glass—Rarity of Personal Ornaments in Britain	374
CHAPTER XIX.[xii]
CLASPS, BUTTONS, BUCKLES, AND MISCELLANEOUS OBJECTS.
Difficulty in Determining the Use of some Objects—Looped Sockets and Tubes—Possibly Clasps—Perforated Rings forming a kind of Brooch—Rings used in Harness—Brooches—Late Celtic—Buttons—Circular Plates and Broad Hoops—Perforated Discs—Slides for Straps—Jingling Ornaments—Objects of Uncertain Use—Rod, with Figures of Birds upon it—Figures of Animals	396
CHAPTER XX.
VESSELS, CALDRONS, ETC.
Fictile Vessels—Gold Cup—Bronze Vessels not found in Barrows—Caldrons found in Scotland—In Ireland—Some of an Etruscan Form—The Skill exhibited in their Manufacture	407
CHAPTER XXI.
METAL, MOULDS, AND THE METHOD OF MANUFACTURE.
Composition of Bronze—Lead absent in early Bronze—Sources of Tin and Copper—Analyses of Bronze Antiquities—Cakes of Copper and Lumps of Metal—Tin discovered in Hoards of Bronze—Ingots of Tin—Methods of Casting—Moulds of Stone for Celts, Palstaves, Daggers, Swords, and Spear-heads—Moulds of Bronze for Palstaves and Celts—The Harty Hoard—Bronze Mould for Gouges—Moulds found in other Countries—Moulds formed of Burnt Clay—Jets or Runners—The Processes for Preparing Bronze Instruments for Use—Rubbers and Whetstones—Decoration—Hammering out and Sharpening the Edges	415
CHAPTER XXII.
CHRONOLOGY AND ORIGIN OF BRONZE.
Inferences from number of Types—Division of Period into Stages—The Evidence of Hoards—Their different Kinds—Personal, Merchants’, and Founders’—Lists of Principal Hoards—Inferences from them—The Transition from Bronze to Iron—Its probable Date—Duration of Bronze Age—Burial Customs of the Period—Different Views as to the Sources of Bronze Civilisation—Suggested Provinces of Bronze—The Britannic Province—Comparison of British and Continental Types—Foreign Influences in Britain—Its Commercial Relations—Imported Ornaments—Condition of Britain during the Bronze Age—General Summary	455

---

WOODCUT ILLUSTRATIONS.

The references are to the original sources of such cuts as have not been engraved expressly for this book.

CHAPTER III.
FLAT AND FLANGED CELTS.
FIG.		PAGE
1.	Cyprus	40
2.	Butterwick	41
3.	Moot Low	44
Llew. Jewitt, F.S.A., “Grave Mounds,” fig. 187.
4.	Yorkshire	45
5.	Weymouth	46
6.	Read	47
7.	Suffolk	48
8.	Arreton Down	49
Archæologia, vol. xxxvi. p. 329.
9.	Plymstock	50
10.	——”	50
Arch. Journ., vol. xxvi. p. 346.
11.	Thames	52
12.	Norfolk	52
13.	Dorsetshire	53
14.	Lewes	53
Arch. Journ., vol. xviii. p. 167.
15.	Ely	53
16.	Barrow	54
17.	Liss	54
18.	Rhosnesney	55
19.	Drumlanrig	56
20.	Lawhead	57
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. vii. p. 105.
21.	Nairn	58
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. ii. N.S.
22.	Falkland	59
23.	Greenlees	59
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. xii. p. 601.
24.	Perth	60
25.	Applegarth	60
26.	Dams	61
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. xiii. p. 120.
27.	Ballinamallard	61
28.	North of Ireland	62
29.	Ireland	62
30.	Tipperary	62
Arch. Journ., vol. vi. p. 410.
31.	Ireland	63
32.	Connor	64
33.	Clontarf	65
34.	Ireland	65
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 248.
35.	Ireland	66
36.	Trim	66
37.	Ireland	66
38.	—”	66
39.	Punched patterns	67
40.	—”———”	67
41.	—”———”	67
42.	—”———”	67
43.	—”———”	67
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” figs. 286 to 290.
44.	Armoy	68
45.	Ireland	68
46.	—”	69
47.	—”	69
CHAPTER IV.
WINGED CELTS AND PALSTAVES.
48.	Icelandic Palstave	71
49.	—”———”	71
Arch. Journ., vol. vii. p. 74.
50.	Wigton	73
51.	Chollerford Bridge	74
52.	Chatham	74
53.	Burwell Fen	75
54.	Bucknell	75
55.	Culham	75
56.	Reeth	76
57.	Dorchester	76
58.	Colwick	77
59.	Barrington	78
60.	Harston	78
61.	Shippey	79
62.	Severn	80
63.	Sunningwell	80
64.	Weymouth	82
65.	Burwell Fen	82
66.	East Harnham	83
67.	Burwell Fen	83
68.[xiv]	Thames	84
69.	Stibbard	84
70.	Irthington	85
71.	North Owersby	85
72.	Bonn	85
73.	Dorchester	87
74.	Wallingford	88
75.	Stanton Harcourt	88
76.	Brassington	89
77.	Bath	89
78.	Oldbury Hill	90
79.	Ross	91
80.	Honington	91
81.	Ely	92
82.	Bottisham	92
83.	Nettleham	93
Arch. Journ., vol. xviii. p. 160.
84.	Cambridge	93
85.	Carlton Rode	94
86.	Penvores	96
87.	West Buckland	96
Arch. Journ., vol. xxxvii. p. 107.
88.	Bryn Crûg	96
89.	Andalusia	97
Arch. Journ., vol. vi. p. 69.
90.	Burreldale Moss	98
91.	Balcarry	98
92.	Pettycur	99
Arch. Journ., vol. vi. p. 377.
93.	Ireland	100
94.	—”	100
95.	—”	101
96.	North of Ireland	101
97.	Lanesborough	101
98.	Trillick	102
99.	Ireland	102
100.	—”	102
101.	—”	102
102.	—”	103
103.	—”	103
104.	—”	103
105.	Miltown	104
106.	Ireland	105
107.	—”	105
108.	—”	105
109.	Ballymena	105
CHAPTER V.
SOCKETED CELTS.
110.	High Roding	109
111.	Dorchester, Oxon	109
112.	Wilts	110
113.	Harty	110
114.	—”	111
115.	Dorchester, Oxon	111
116.	Reach Fen	112
117.	—”——”	112
118.	Canterbury	114
119.	Usk	114
120.	Alfriston	115
121.	Cambridge Fens	116
122.	High Roding	116
123.	Chrishall	117
124.	Reach Fen	117
125.	Barrington	117
126.	Mynydd-y-Glas	119
127.	Stogursey	120
128.	Guildford	120
129.	Frettenham	120
130.	Ely	121
131.	Caston	121
132.	Carlton Rode	122
133.	Fornham	122
134.	Fen Ditton	123
135.	Bottisham	123
136.	Winwick	123
137.	Kingston	124
138.	Cayton Carr	124
139.	Lakenheath	125
140.	Thames	125
141.	Kingston	125
142.	—–”	126
143.	Thames	127
144.	Givendale	127
145.	Cambridge	127
146.	Blandford	127
147.	Ireland (?)	128
148.	Barrington	128
149.	Hounslow	128
150.	Wallingford	128
151.	Newham	129
152.	Westow	130
153.	Wandsworth	130
Arch. Journ., vol. vi. p. 378.
154.	Whittlesea	130
155.	Nettleham	132
Arch. Journ., vol. xviii. p. 160.
156.	Croker Collection	132
157.	Nettleham	132
Arch. Journ., vol. xviii. p. 160.
158.	Ulleskelf	132
159.	Reach Fen	133
160.	Carlton Rode	133
161.	Arras	134
162.	Bell’s Mills	135
“Catal. Ant. Mus. Ed.”
163.	North Knapdale	136
164.	Bell’s Mills	136
165.	—”——”	136
“Catal. Ant. Mus. Ed.”
166.	Leswalt	137
Ayr and Wigton Coll., vol. ii. p. 11.
167.	Ireland	138
168.	—”	138
169.	Belfast	139
170.	Ireland	139
171.	—”	139
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 280.
172.	Athboy	140
173.	Meath	140
174.	Ireland	140
175.	Newtown Crommolin	141
176.	North of Ireland	141
177.[xv]	Ireland	141
178.	—”	142
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R.I.A.,” fig. 275.
179.	Kertch	142
Arch. Journ., vol. xiv. p. 91.
CHAPTER VI.
METHODS OF HAFTING CELTS.
180.	Stone Axe of Montezuma II.	148
181.	Aymara Stone Hatchet	148
182.	Modern African Axe of Iron	149
183.	Stone Axe, Robenhausen	150
184.	Bronze Axe, Hallein	152
185.	Raron, Brigue	154
186.	Edenderry	155
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R.I.A.,” fig. 257.
187.	Chiusi	156
188.	Winwick	158
189.	Everley	163
CHAPTER VII.
CHISELS, GOUGES, AND OTHER TOOLS.
190.	Plymstock	166
Arch. Journ., vol. xxvi. p. 346.
191.	Heathery Burn	166
192.	Glenluce	166
192*.	Carlton Rode	167
193.	Wallingford	168
194.	Reach Fen	168
195.	Thixendale	168
196.	Yattendon	169
197.	Broxton	169
198.	Scotland	170
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. xii. p. 613.
199.	Ireland	170
200.	Carlton Rode	171
201.	Westow	172
202.	Heathery Burn Cave	172
203.	Carlton Rode	173
204.	Thorndon	174
205.	Harty	174
206.	Undley	175
207.	Carlton Rode	175
208.	Tay	175
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. v. p. 127.
209.	Ireland	176
210.	Thorndon	178
211.	Harty	178
212.	—”	178
213.	Carlton Rode	178
214.	Taunton	178
215.	Ireland	179
Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd S., vol. iii. p. 66.
216.	Dowris	179
Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd S., vol. iii. p. 65.
217.	Fresné la Mère	182
218.	—”———”	182
219.	Heathery Burn Cave	185
220.	Harty	186
221.	Reach Fen	186
222.	Ebnall	186
Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd S., vol. iii. p. 66.
223.	Upton Lovel	189
Archæologia, vol. xliii. p. 466.
224.	Thorndon	189
225.	Butterwick	189
226.	Bulford	190
Archæologia, vol. xliii. p. 465.
227.	Winterbourn Stoke	190
228.	Wiltshire	191
Archæologia, vol. xliii. p. 467.
229.	Llangwyllog	192
230.	Ireland	192
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R.I.A.,” fig. 403.
CHAPTER VIII.
SICKLES.
231.	Mœrigen	196
Arch. Journ., vol. xxx. p. 192.
232.	Edington Burtle	197
233.	—”———”	197
234.	Thames	198
235.	Near Bray	199
236.	Near Errol, Perthshire	200
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. vii. p. 378.
237.	Garvagh, Derry	200
238.	Athlone	201
CHAPTER IX.
KNIVES, RAZORS, ETC.
239.	Wicken Fen	204
240.	Thorndon	205
241.	Reach Fen	205
242.	Heathery Burn Cave	206
Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd S., vol. ii. p. 132.
243.	Kilgraston, Perthshire	206
244.	Kells	207
245.	Ireland	208
246.	Moira	209
247.	Fresné la Mère	209
248.	Skye	209
Wilson’s “Preh. Ann. of Scot.,” vol. i. p. 400.
249.	Wester Ord	209
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. viii. p. 310.
250.	Reach Fen	210
251.	—”——”	210
252.	Heathery Burn Cave	212
253.	Harty	212
254.	Ireland	212
255.	Ballyclare	213
256.	Reach Fen	213
257.	Ballycastle	213
258.	Ireland	213
259.	Wigginton	214
260.	Isle of Harty	214
261.[xvi]	Allhallows, Hoo	214
262.	Cottle	215
Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd S., vol. ii. p. 301.
263.	Reach Fen	216
264.	Lady Low	216
265.	Winterslow	216
266.	Priddy	216
267.	Balblair	217
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. vii. p. 476.
268.	Rogart	217
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. x. p. 431.
269.	Wallingford	218
270.	Heathery Burn Cave	218
271.	Dunbar	219
272.	—”	219
273.	—”	219
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. x. p. 440.
274.	Ireland	219
Wilde’s “Catal. Mus. R.I.A.,” fig. 433.
275.	Kinleith	220
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. v. p. 87.
276.	Nidau	221
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. v. p. 91.
CHAPTER X.
DAGGERS AND THEIR HILTS.—RAPIER-SHAPED BLADES.
277.	Roundway	223
278.	Driffield	224
279.	Butterwick	225
280.	Helperthorpe	227
281.	——–”	227
282.	Garton	228
Archæologia, vol. xliii. p. 441.
283.	Wilmslow	228
284.	Hammeldon Down	229
285.	Reach Fen	230
286.	Allhallows, Hoo	230
287.	Brigmilston	231
288.	Leicester	231
289.	Normanton	232
290.	Roke Down	233
291.	Ireland	235
292.	Belleek	235
Journ. R. H. and A. Assoc. of Ireland, 4th S., vol. ii. p. 196.
293.	Ireland	235
294.	Woodyates	236
295.	Homington	237
296.	Idmiston	237
297.	Dow Low	239
298.	Cleigh	239
Proc. Soc. Ant. Soc., vol. x. p. 84.
299.	Collessie	239
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. xii. p. 440.
300.	Musdin	240
301.	Plymstock	240
Arch. Journ., vol. xxvi. p. 346.
302.	Winterbourn Stoke	240
303.	Camerton	243
304.	Cambridge	243
305.	Magherafelt	245
Journ. R. H. and A. Assoc. of Ireland, 2nd S., vol. i. p. 286.
306.	Arreton Down	245
307.	Kinghorn	245
308.	Colloony	246
309.	Ireland	246
Wilde’s “Catal. Mus. R.I.A.” fig. 347.
310.	Kilrea	247
311.	Thames	247
312.	Thatcham	247
313.	Coveney	249
314.	Thames	249
315.	Chatteris	251
316.	Thetford	251
317.	Londonderry	251
318.	Lissane	252
Wilde’s “Catal. Mus. R.I.A.,” fig. 314.
319.	Galbally	253
Journ. R. H. and A. Assoc. of Ireland, 4th S., vol. ii. p. 197.
320.	Tipperary	254
321.	Ely	255
322.	North of Ireland	255
323.	Raphoe	255
CHAPTER XI.
TANGED AND SOCKETED DAGGERS, OR SPEAR-HEADS, HALBERDS AND MACES.
324.	Arreton Down	258
325.	Stratford le Bow	258
326.	Matlock	259
327.	Plymstock	259
Arch. Journ., vol. xxvi. p. 349.
328.	Arreton Down	260
329.	Årup	261
Montelius, “Sver. Forntid,” fig. 131.
330.	China	262
331.	Ireland	264
332.	Cavan	266
333.	Newtown Limavady	267
334.	Ballygawley	267
335.	Falkland	268
336.	Stranraer	268
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. vii. p. 423.
337.	Harbyrnrigge	269
338.	Shropshire	269
339.	Lidgate	271
Arch. Journ., vol. vi. p. 181.
340.	Great Bedwin	271
Arch. Journ., vol. vi. p. 411.
341.	Ireland	271
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R.I.A.,” fig. 361.
CHAPTER XII.
LEAF-SHAPED SWORDS.
342.	Battersea	278
343.	Barrow	279
344.	Newcastle	281
345.[xvii]	Wetheringsett	283
346.	Tiverton	284
347.	Kingston	284
348.	Ely	286
349.	River Cherwell	286
350.	Lincoln	287
Proc. Soc. Ant., vol. ii. p. 199.
351.	Whittingham	288
352.	Brechin	288
353.	Edinburgh	290
354.	Newtown Limavady	292
355.	Ireland	292
356.	—”	292
357.	—”	292
358.	Muckno	294
359.	—”	294
Journ. R. H. & A. Assoc. of Ireland, 3rd S., vol. i. p. 23.
360.	Muckno	295
361.	Mullylagan	295
Journ. R. H. & A. Assoc. of Ireland, 4th S., vol. ii. p. 257.
362.	Mullylagan	295
363.	Ireland	296
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 322.
CHAPTER XIII.
SCABBARDS AND CHAPES.
364.	Isleworth	302
365.	Guilsfield	303
366.	River Isis, near Dorchester	303
367.	Ireland	303
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 335.
368.	Stogursey, Somerset	304
369.	Brechin	304
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. i. p. 81.
370.	Pant-y-Maen	304
371.	Reach Fen	305
372.	Cloonmore	305
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 336.
373.	Stoke Ferry	305
374.	Keelogue Ford, Ireland	306
375.	Mildenhall	306
376.	Thames	307
377.	Isle of Harty	308
CHAPTER XIV.
SPEAR-HEADS, LANCE-HEADS, ETC.
378.	Thames, London	312
379.	Lough Gur	312
380.	—”——”	312
381.	Heathery Burn Cave	312
382.	Nettleham	314
Arch. Journ., vol. xviii. p. 159.
383.	Achtertyre	315
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. ix. p. 435.
384.	North of Ireland	316
385.	Newark	317
386.	Reach Fen	317
387.	Ireland	317
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 367.
388.	North of Ireland	319
389.	Ireland	319
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 368.
390.	Reach Fen	319
391.	Thorndon	319
392.	Culham	320
393.	Athenry	320
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 382.
394.	Thetford	321
395.	Lakenheath	323
396.	Near Cambridge	323
397.	North of Ireland	323
398.	Ireland	324
399.	Thames	324
400.	Ireland	324
401.	Near Ballymena	325
402.	Ireland	326
403.	—”	326
404.	—”	326
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” figs. 385, 386, 378.
405.	Elford	327
406.	Isleham Fen	328
407.	Stibbard	329
408.	Ireland	329
409.	Lakenheath Fen	329
410.	Nettleham	330
Arch. Journ., vol. xviii. p. 160.
411.	Knockans	331
412.	Lurgan	332
Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd S., vol. ii. p. 65.
413.	Ireland	332
414.	Antrim	332
415.	Thames	333
416.	Naworth Castle	333
417.	Blakehope	334
418.	Whittingham	334
419.	Winmarleigh	335
420.	Burwell Fen	336
421.	Denhead	337
“Catal. Ant. Mus. Ed.,” p. 98.
422.	Speen	337
423.	Nettleham	339
Arch. Journ., vol. xviii. p. 160.
424.	Guilsfield	339
425.	Glancych	341
426.	Fulbourn	341
427.	Hereford	341
CHAPTER XV.
SHIELDS, BUCKLERS, AND HELMETS.
428.	Little Wittenham	344
Messrs. James Parker & Co.
429.	Harlech	345
430.	Coveney	346
431.	—–”	347
432.	Beith	347
433.	—”	348
434.[xviii]	Beith	349
Ayr and Wigton Coll., vol. i. p. 66.
435.	Yetholm	350
436.	—–”	350
437.	—–”	350
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. v. p. 165.
CHAPTER XVI.
TRUMPETS AND BELLS.
438.	Limerick	357
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 360.
439.	Tralee	358
440.	—”	359
441.	—”	359
Journ. R. H. and A. Assoc. of Ireland, 4th S., vol. iii. p. 422.
442.	Africa	359
443.	Derrynane	360
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 529.
444.	Portglenone	361
Journ. R. H. and A. Assoc. of Ireland, 4th S., vol. iii. p. 422.
445.	The Caprington Horn	362
Ayr and Wigton Coll., vol. i. p. 74.
446.	Dowris	364
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 523.
CHAPTER XVII.
PINS.
447.	Heathery Burn Cave	365
Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd S., vol. ii. p. 130.
448.	Brigmilston	366
449.	Everley	366
450.	Bryn Crûg	367
Arch. Journ., vol. xxv. p. 246.
451.	Taunton	367
452.	Chilton Bustle	367
Arch. Journ., vol. ix. p. 106.
453.	Ireland	368
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 452.
454.	River Wandle	368
Arch. Journ., vol. ix. p. 8.
455.	Scratchbury	369
456.	Camerton	369
Both from Archæologia, vol. xliii. p. 468.
457.	Ireland	370
458.	—”	370
459.	Cambridge	370
460.	Ireland	370
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 447.
461.	North of Ireland	370
462.	Keelogue Ford	371
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 449.
463.	Ireland	371
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.” fig. 448.
464.	Edinburgh	372
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., New S., vol. i. p. 322.
465.	Ireland	372
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 450.
CHAPTER XVIII.
TORQUES, BRACELETS, RINGS, EAR-RINGS, AND PERSONAL ORNAMENTS.
466.	Wedmore	375
467.	–—”	376
468.	West Buckland	377
Arch. Journ., vol. xxxvii. p. 107.
469.	Wedmore	378
470.	Yarnton	379
471.	Montgomeryshire	380
Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd S., vol. iv. p. 467.
472.	Achtertyre	382
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. ix. p. 435.
473.	Redhill	382
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. i. p. 138.
474.	Scilly	383
475.	Liss	383
476.	Stoke Prior	384
Arch. Journ., vol. xx. p. 200.
477.	Stobo Castle	384
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. ii. p. 277.
478.	Guernsey	385
Arch. Assoc. Journ., vol. iii. p. 344.
479.	Cornwall	385
480.	Normanton	385
Archæologia, vol. xliii. p. 469.
481.	West Buckland	386
Arch. Journ., vol. xxxvii. p. 107.
482.	Ham Cross	386
483.	Heathery Burn Cave	386
Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd S., vol. ii. p. 131.
484.	County Cavan	387
485.	Cowlam	387
486.	–—”	388
487.	Ireland	389
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 480.
488.	Woolmer Forest	390
Proc. Soc. Ant., vol. ii. p. 83.
489.	Dumbarton	390
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. iii. p. 24.
490.	Cowlam	392
491.	Goodmanham	392
Greenwell’s “British Barrows,” p. 324.
492.	Orton	392
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. viii. p. 30.
CHAPTER XIX.
CLASPS, BUTTONS, BUCKLES, AND MISCELLANEOUS OBJECTS.
493.	Reach Fen	397
494.	—”—–”	397
495.	Broadward	397
Arch. Camb., 4th S., vol. iii. p. 354.
496.	Trillick	398
Journ. R. H. and A. Assoc. of Ireland, 3rd S., vol. i. p. 164.
497.	Ireland	399
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 494.
498.	Cowlam	400
499.	Reach Fen	400
500.[xix]	Edinburgh	401
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., New S., vol. i. p. 322.
501.	Heathery Burn Cave	402
502.	——”———–”	402
Both from Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd S., vol. iii. p. 236.
503.	Harty	403
504.	Dreuil, Amiens	404
505.	Abergele	404
506.	—–”	404
507.	—–”	404
508.	Dreuil, Amiens	405
CHAPTER XX.
VESSELS, CALDRONS, ETC.
509.	Golden Cup, Rillaton	408
Arch. Journ., vol. xxiv. p. 189.
510.	Kincardine Moss	410
Wilson, “Preh. Ann. of Scot.,” vol. i. p. 409.
511.	Ireland	411
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 407.
512.	Ireland	412
Wilde, “Catal. Mus. R. I. A.,” fig. 409.
513.	Capecastle Bog	413
CHAPTER XXI.
METAL, MOULDS, AND THE METHOD OF MANUFACTURE.
514.	Falmouth	426
Arch. Journ., vol. xvi. p. 39.
515.	Ballymena	429
516.	Ireland	431
517.	—–”	431
518.	Ballymoney	433
519.	Broughshane	433
520.	Knighton	434
521.	——”	434
522.	Maghera, Co. Derry	435
523.	Lough Gur	436
Arch. Journ., vol. xx. p. 170.
524.	Campbelton	437
525.	——”	437
526.	——”	437
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. vi. p. 48.
527.	Hotham Carr	439
528.	Wiltshire	440
529.	—–”	440
Proc. Soc. Ant., vol. iii. p. 158.
530.	Harty	441
531.	—”	442
532.	—”	446
533.	Heathery Burn Cave	448
Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd S., vol. ii. p. 132.
534.	Stogursey	450
535.	——”	450
536.	——”	450
537.	Heathery Burn Cave	451
Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd S., vol. ii. p. 132.
538.	Kirby Moorside	452
539.	Hove	452
Sussex Arch. Coll., vol. ix. p. 120.
540.	Harty	453

---

ERRATA.

Page	117,	under fig. 123, for “Crishall” read “Chrishall.”
”	143,	line 15, for “Spain” read “Portugal.”
”	207,	”  34, for “St. Genoulph” read “St. Genouph.”
”	215,	”  16, for “St. Julien Chateuil” read “St. Jullien, Chapleuil.”
”	314,	”    3, from bottom, for “Staffordshire” read “Shropshire.”
”	322,	”    4, for “Suffolk” read “Sussex.”
”	336,	”  20, for “Staffordshire” read “Shropshire.”
”	452,	”    4 from bottom, for “Staffordshire” read “Shropshire.”

---

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

Having already in a former work attempted the arrangement and description of the Ancient Stone Implements and Ornaments of Great Britain, I am induced to undertake a similar task in connection with those Bronze Antiquities which belong to the period when Stone was gradually falling into disuse for cutting purposes, and Iron was either practically unknown in this country, or had been but partially adopted for tools and weapons.

The duration and chronological position of this bronze-using period will have to be discussed hereafter, but I must at the outset reiterate what I said some eight or ten years ago, that in this county, at all events, it is impossible to fix any hard and fast limits for the close of the Stone Period, or for the beginning or end of the Bronze Period, or for the commencement of that of Iron. Though the succession of these three stages of civilisation may here be regarded as certain, the transition from one to the other in a country of such an extent as Britain—occupied, moreover, as it probably was, by several tribes of different descent, manners, and customs—must have required a long course of years to become general; and even in any particular district the change cannot have been sudden.

There must of necessity have been a time when in each district the new phase of civilisation was being introduced, and the old conditions had not been entirely changed. So that, as I have elsewhere pointed out, the three stages of progress represented by the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Periods, like the three principal colours of the rainbow, overlap, intermingle, and shade off the one into the other, though their succession, so far as Britain and Western Europe are concerned, appears to be equally well defined with that of the prismatic colours.

[2]

In thus speaking of a bronze-using period I by no means wish to exclude the possible use of copper unalloyed with tin. There is indeed every ground for believing that in some parts of the world the use of native copper must have continued for a lengthened period before it was discovered that the addition of a small proportion of tin not only rendered it more readily fusible, but added to its elasticity and hardness, and thus made it more serviceable for tools and weapons. Even after the advantages of the alloy over the purer metal were known, the local scarcity of tin may at times have caused so small a quantity of that metal to be employed, that the resulting mixture can hardly be regarded as bronze; or at times this dearth may have necessitated the use of copper alone, either native or as smelted from the ore.

Of this Copper Age, however, there are in Europe but extremely feeble traces, if indeed any can be said to exist. It appears not unlikely that the views which are held by many archæologists as to the Asiatic origin of bronze may prove to be well founded, and that when the use of copper was introduced into Europe, the discovery had already long been made that it was more serviceable when alloyed with tin than when pure. In connection with this it may be observed that the most important discovery of instruments of copper as yet recorded in the Old World is that which was made at Gungeria in Central India.[1] They consisted of flat celts of what has been regarded as the most primitive type; but with them were found some ornaments of silver, a circumstance which seems to militate against their extreme antiquity, as the production of silver involves a considerable amount of metallurgical skill, and probably an acquaintance with lead and other metals. However this may be, there are reasons for supposing that if a Copper Age existed in the Old World its home was in Asia or the most eastern part of Europe, and not in any western country.

The most instructive instance of a Copper Age, as distinct from one of Bronze, is that afforded by certain districts of North America, in which we find good evidence of a period when, in addition to stone as a material from which tools and weapons were made, copper also was employed, and used in its pure native condition without the addition of any alloy.

The State of Wisconsin[2] alone has furnished upwards of a hundred axes, spear-heads, and knives formed of copper; and, to judge from some extracts from the writings of the early travellers[3] given by the Rev. E. F. Slafter,[3] that part of America would seem to have entered on its Copper Age long before it was first brought into contact with European civilisation, towards the middle of the sixteenth century. It has been thought by several American antiquaries that some at least of these tools and weapons were produced by the process of casting, though the preponderance of opinion seems to be in favour of all of them being shaped by the hammer and not cast. Among others I may mention my friend the Hon. Colonel C. C. Jones, who has examined this question for me, and has been unable to discover any instance of one of these copper tools or weapons having been indisputably cast.

That they were originally wrought, and not cast, is à priori in the highest degree probable. On some parts of the shores of Lake Superior native copper occurs in great abundance, and would no doubt attract the attention of the early occupants of the country. Accustomed to the use of stone, they would at first regard the metal as merely a stone of peculiarly heavy nature, and on attempting to chip it or work it into shape would at once discover that it yielded to a blow instead of breaking, and that in fact it was a malleable stone. Of this ductile property the North American savage availed himself largely, and was able to produce spear-heads with sockets adapted for the reception of their shafts by merely hammering out the base of the spear-head and turning it over to form the socket, in the same manner as is so often employed in the making of iron tools. But though the great majority of the instruments hitherto found, if not all, have been hammered and not cast, it would appear that the process of melting copper was not entirely unknown. Squier and Davis have observed,[4] “that the metal appears to have been worked in all cases in a cold state. This is somewhat remarkable, as the fires upon the altars were sufficiently strong in some instances to melt down the copper implements and ornaments deposited upon them, and the fact that the metal is fusible could hardly have escaped notice.” That it did not altogether escape observation is shown by the evidence of De Champlain,[5] the founder of the city of Quebec. In 1610 he was joining a party of Algonquins, one of whom met him on his barque, and after conversation “tira d’un sac une pièce de cuivre de la longueur d’un pied qu’il me donna, le quel[4] estoit fort beau et bien franc, me donnant à entendre qu’il en avoit en quantité là ou il l’avoit pris, qui estoit sur le bort d’une rivière proche d’un grand lac et qu’ils le prenoient par morceaux, et le faisant fondre le mettoient en lames, et avec des pierres le rendoient uny.”

We have here, then, evidence of a Copper Age,[6] in comparatively modern times, during most of which period the process of fusing the metal was unknown. In course of time, however, this art was discovered, and had not European influences been brought to bear upon the country this discovery might, as in other parts of the world, have led to the knowledge of other fusible metals, and eventually to the art of manufacturing bronze—an alloy already known in Mexico and Peru.[7]

So far as regards the Old World there are some who have supposed that, owing to iron being a simple and not a compound metal like bronze, and owing to the readiness with which it may be produced in the metallic condition from some of its ores, iron must have been in use before copper. Without denying the abstract possibility of this having been the case in some part of our globe, I think it will be found that among the nations occupying the shores of the eastern half of the Mediterranean—a part of the world which may be regarded as the cradle of European civilisation—not only are all archæological discoveries in favour of the succession of iron to bronze, but even historical evidence supports their testimony.

In the Introductory Chapter of my book on Ancient Stone Implements I have already touched upon this question, on which, however, it will here be desirable farther to enlarge.

The light thrown upon the subכject by the Hebrew Scriptures is but small. There is, however, in them frequent mention of most of the metals now in ordinary use. But the word כְהֹשֶה, which in our version is translated brass—a compound of copper and zinc—would be more properly translated copper, as indeed it is in one instance, though there it would seem erroneously, when two vessels of fine copper, precious as gold, are mentioned.[8] In some passages, however, it would appear as if the word would be more correctly[5] rendered bronze than copper, as, for instance, where Moses[9] is commanded to cast five sockets of brass for the pillars to carry the hangings at the door of the tabernacle, which could hardly have been done from a metal so difficult to cast as unalloyed copper. Indeed if tin were known, and there appears little doubt that the word בְדִיל represents that metal, its use as an alloy for copper can hardly have been unknown. It may, then, be regarded as an accepted fact that at the time when the earliest books of the Hebrew Scriptures were reduced to writing, gold,[10] silver, iron, tin, lead, and brass, or more probably bronze, were known. To what date this reduction to writing is to be assigned is a question into which it would be somewhat out of place here to enter. The results, however, of modern criticism tend to prove that it can hardly be so remote as the fourteenth century before our era.

In the Book of Job, as to the date of which also there is some diversity of opinion, we find evidence of a considerable acquaintance with the metals: “Surely there is a vein for the silver, and a place for gold where they fine it. Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass is molten out of the stone.”[11] Lead is also mentioned, but not tin.

Before quitting this part of the subject I ought perhaps to allude to the passage respecting Tubal-Cain,[12] the seventh in descent from Adam, who is mentioned as “an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron,” or a furbisher[13] of every cutting instrument in those metals. This must, however, be regarded as a tradition incorporated in the narrative at the time it was written, and probably with some accessory colouring in connection with the name which Gesenius has suggested may mean scoriarum faber, a maker of dross, and which others have connected with that of Vulcan. Sir Gardner Wilkinson[14] has remarked on this subject that whatever may have been the case in earlier times, “no direct mention is made of iron arms or tools till after the Exodus,” and that “some are even inclined to doubt the barzel (בִַֹרֲזֶל), of the Hebrews being really that metal,” iron.

Movers[15] has observed that in the whole Pentateuch iron is mentioned only thirteen times, while bronze appears no less than forty-four, which he considers to be in favour of the later introduction of iron; as also the fact that bronze, and not iron,[6] was associated with gold and silver in the fittings for the Tabernacle.

For other passages in Scripture relative to the employment of brass or bronze, and iron, among the Jews, the reader may consult an excellent article by the Rev. John Hodgson in the first volume of the Archæologia Æliana (1816), “An Inquiry into the Era when Brass was used in purposes to which Iron is now applied.” From this paper I have largely borrowed in subsequent pages.

As to the succession of the two metals, bronze and iron, among the ancient Egyptians, there is a considerable diversity of opinion among those who have studied the subject. Sir Gardner Wilkinson,[16] judging mainly from pictorial representations, thinks that the Egyptians of an early Pharaonic age were acquainted with the use of iron, and accounts for the extreme rarity of actual examples by the rapid decomposition of the metal in the nitrous soil of Egypt. M. Chabas,[17] the author of a valuable and interesting work upon primitive history, mainly as exhibited by Egyptian monuments, believes that the people of Egypt were acquainted with the use of iron from the dawn of their historic period, and upwards of 3000 years b.c. made use of it for all the purposes to which we now apply it, and even prescribed its oxide as a medicinal preparation. M. Mariette,[18] on the contrary, whose personal explorations entitle his opinion to great weight, is of opinion that the early Egyptians never really made use of iron, and seems to think that from some mythological cause that metal was regarded as the bones of Typhon, and was the object of a certain repugnance. M. Chabas himself is, indeed, of opinion that iron was used with extreme reserve, and, so to speak, only in exceptional cases. This he considers to have been partly due to religious motives, and partly to the greater abundance of bronze, which the Egyptians well knew how to mix so as to give it a fine temper. From whatever cause, the discovery of iron or steel instruments among Egyptian antiquities is of extremely rare occurrence; and there are hardly any to which a date can be assigned with any approach to certainty. The most ancient appears to be a curved scimitar-like blade discovered by Belzoni beneath one of the Sphinxes of Karnak, and now in the British[7] Museum.[19] Its date is stated to be about 600 b.c.[20] A wedge of iron appears, however, to have been found in a joint between the stones of the Great Pyramid.[21]

Without in any way disputing the occasional use of iron among the ancient Egyptians, nor the interpretation of the colours red and blue on the tomb of Rameses III. as being intended to represent blades of bronze and iron or steel respectively, I may venture to suggest that the round blue bar,[22] against which butchers are represented as sharpening their knives in some of the pictures in the sepulchres of Thebes, may have been too hastily regarded as a steel instead of as a whetstone of a blue colour. The existence of a steel for the purpose of sharpening seems to imply not only the knowledge of the preparation of the metal and its subsequent hardening, but also of files or of other tools to produce the peculiar striated surface to which the sharpening property of a steel is due. Had such tools been known, it seems almost impossible that no trace of them should have come down to our times. Moreover, if used for sharpening bronze knives, a steel such as at present used would sooner become clogged and unfit for use than if employed for sharpening steel knives.

Lepsius[23] has observed that the pictures of the old Empire do not afford an example of arms painted in blue, the metal of weapons being always painted in red or bright brown. Iron was but little used under the old Empire; copper was employed in its stead where the hardness of iron was not indispensable.

However this may be, it seems admitted on all hands that the use of iron in Egypt in early times was much restricted, probably from some religious motive. May not this have arisen from the first iron there known having been, as it appears to have been in some other countries, of meteoric origin? The Coptic name for iron, ⲂⲈⲚⲒⲠⲈ which has been interpreted by Professor Lauth[24] as “the Stone of Heaven,” strongly favours such a view. The resemblance of this term to ⲂⲀⲀ-Ⲛ-ⲠⲈ, the baa of heaven, or celestial iron, has also been pointed out by M. Chabas,[25] who, however, is inclined to consider that steel was so called on account of its reflecting the colour of the sky. If the iron in use among the[8] early Egyptians were meteoric, and its celestial origin acknowledged, both its rarity and its restricted use would be accounted for. The term “bone of Typhon,” as applied to iron, is given by Plutarch on the authority of Manetho, who wrote in the days of the first Ptolemy. It appears to be used only in contrast to the name “bone of Horus,” which, according to the same author, was applied to the loadstone, and it seems difficult to admit any great antiquity for the appellation, or to connect it with a period when iron was at all rare, or its use restricted.

Although the use of iron in Egypt was at an early period comparatively unknown, that of bronze was most extensive. The weapons of war,[26] the tools for various trades, including those of the engraver and sculptor, were all made of that metal, which in its crude form served also as a kind of circulating medium. It appears to have been mainly imported from Asia, some of the principal sources of copper being in the peninsula of Sinai. One of the chief mines was situated at Sarbout-el-Khadem, where both turquoises and copper ore were extracted, and the latter smelted at Wady-Nash. The copper mines of Wady-Magarah are thought to have been worked as early as the second dynasty, upwards of 3000 years b.c.; and in connection with ancient Egyptian mining, it is worthwhile again to cite Agatharchides,[27] whose testimony I have already adduced in my “Ancient Stone Implements,” and who relates that in his time, circa b.c. 100, there were found buried in some ancient gold-mines in Upper Egypt the bronze chisels or wedges (λατομίδες χαλκᾶι) of the old miners, and who accounts for their being of that metal by the fact that when those mines were wrought, men were in no way acquainted with the use of iron.

In the seventh century b.c., however, iron must have been in general use in Egypt, for on the landing of the Carians and Ionians,[28] who were armed with bronze, an Egyptian, who had never before seen men armed with that metal, ran to Psammetichus to inform him that brazen men had risen from the sea and were wasting the country. As Psammetichus himself is described as wearing a brazen helmet, the arms mentioned would seem to have been offensive rather than defensive.

The source whence the tin, which formed a constituent part of[9] the bronze, was derived, is much more uncertain. Indeed, to judge from M. Chabas’ silence, its name and hieroglyphic are unknown, though from some of the uses to which the metal designated by was applied, it seems possible that it may have been tin.

On the whole, to judge from documentary evidence alone, the question as to the successive use of the different metals in Egypt seems to be excessively obscure, some of them being almost impossible to identify by name or representative sign. If, however, we turn to the actual relics of the past, we find bronze tools and weapons in abundance, while those of iron are extremely scarce, and are either of late date or at best of uncertain age. So strong, indeed, is the material evidence, that the late Mr. Crawfurd,[29] while disputing any general and universal sequence of iron to bronze, confesses that Ancient Egypt seems to offer a case in which a Bronze Age clearly preceded an Iron one, or at least in which cutting instruments of bronze preceded those of iron.

Among the Assyrians iron seems to have been in considerable use at an early date, and to have been exported from that country to Egypt, but knives and long chisels or hatchets of bronze were among the objects found at Tel Sifr, in Southern Babylonia. The earliest bronze image to which a date can be assigned appears to be that on which M. Oppert has read the name of Koudourmapouk, King of the Soumirs and Accads,[30] who, according to M. Lenormant, lived about 2100 b.c. Dr. S. Birch reads the name as Kudurmabug (about 2200 b.c.). Others in the British Museum are referred to Gudea, who reigned about 1700 b.c.

The mythology and literature of ancient Greece and Rome are so intimately connected, that in discussing the evidence afforded by classical writers it will be needless to separate them, but the testimony of both Greek and Latin authors may be taken indiscriminately, though, of course, the former afford the more ancient evidence. I have already cited much of this evidence in the Introductory Chapter of my book on Ancient Stone Implements, mainly with the view of showing the succession of bronze to stone; on the present occasion I have to re-adduce it, together with what corroborative testimony I am able to procure, in order to show that, along the northern shores of the Mediterranean, philology and history agree as to the priority of the use of bronze for cutting instruments to that of iron.

[10]

The Greek language itself bears witness to this fact, for the words significant of working in iron are not derived from the name of that metal, but from that of bronze, and the old forms of χαλκεύς and χαλκεύειν remained in use in connection with the smith and his work long after the blacksmith had to a great extent superseded the bronze-founder and the copper-smith in the fabrication of arms and cutlery.[31] An analogous transition in the meaning of words has been pointed out by Professor Max Müller. “The Mexicans called their own copper or bronze tepuztli, which is said to have meant originally hatchet. The same word is now used for iron, with which the Mexicans first became acquainted through their intercourse with the Spaniards. Tepuztli then became a general name for metal, and when copper had to be distinguished from iron, the former was called red, the latter black tepuztli.”[32] I am not certain whether Professor Max Müller still retains the views which he expressed in 1864. He then pointed out[33] that “what makes it likely that iron was not known previous to the separation of the Aryan nations is the fact that its names vary in every one of their languages.” But there is a “name for copper, which is shared in common by Latin and the Teutonic languages, æs, æris, Gothic ais, Old High German êr, Modern German Er-z, Anglo-Saxon âr, English ore. Like chalkós, which originally meant copper, but came to mean metal in general, bronze or brass, the Latin æs, too, changed from the former to the latter meaning; and we can watch the same transition in the corresponding words of the Teutonic languages.... It is all the more curious, therefore, that the Sanskrit ayas, which is the same word as aes and aiz, should in Sanskrit have assumed the almost exclusive meaning of iron. I suspect, however, that in Sanskrit, too, ayas meant originally the metal, i.e. copper, and that as iron took the place of copper, the meaning of ayas was changed and specified.... In German, too, the name for iron was derived from the older name of copper. The Gothic eisarn, iron, is considered by Grimm as a derivative form of aiz, and the same scholar concludes from this that ‘in Germany bronze must have been in use before iron.’”

But to return to Greece. It is, of course, somewhat doubtful how far the word χαλκὸς, as used by the earliest Greek authors, was[11] intended to apply to unalloyed copper, or to that mixture of copper and tin which we now know as bronze. Mr. Gladstone,[34] who on all questions relating to Homer ought to be one of the best living authorities, regards the word as meaning copper: firstly, because it is always spoken of by Homer as a pure metal along with other pure metals; secondly, on account of the epithets ἐρυθρὸς, ἤνοψ, and νώροψ, which mean red, bright, and gleaming, being applied to it, and which Mr. Gladstone considers to be inapplicable to bronze; and thirdly, because Homer does not appear to have known anything at all of the fusion or alloying of metals. The second reason he considers further strengthened by the probability that Homer would not represent the walls of the palace of Alcinous as plated with bronze, nor introduce a heaven of bronze among the imposing imagery of battle (Il., xvii. 424). On the whole he concludes that χαλκὸς was copper hardened by some method, as some think by the agency of water, or else and more probably according to a very simple process, by cooling slowly in the air.[35]

I regret to say that these conclusions appear to me to be founded to some extent on false premises and on more than one misconception. The process of heating copper and then dipping it in water or allowing it slowly to cool, so far from being adapted for hardening that metal, is that which is usually adopted for annealing or softening it. While the plunging into cold water of steel at a red heat has the effect of rendering that metal intensely hard, on copper the reverse is the result; and, as Dr. Percy has observed,[36] it is immaterial whether the cooling after annealing—or restoring its malleability by means of heat—takes place slowly or rapidly. Indeed, one alloy of copper and tin is rendered most malleable by rapid cooling.

It has been stated[37] that bronze of the ancient composition may by cooling it slowly be rendered as hard as steel, and at the same time less brittle, but this statement seems to require confirmation.

According to some[38] the impossibility of hardening bronze like steel by dipping it into water had passed into a proverb so early as the days of Æschylus, but “χαλκοῦ βαφάς” has by others been[12] regarded as referring to the impossibility of dyeing metal.[39] Some of the commentators on Hesiod and Homer speak, however, distinctly as to a process of hardening bronze by a dipping or βαφὴ, and Virgil[40] represents the Cyclopes as dipping the hissing bronze in water—

“Alii stridentia tingunt

Æra lacu”—

but the idea of bronze being hardened or tempered by this process appears to me to have been based on a false analogy between this metal and steel, or even iron. The French chemist, Geoffroy, thought he had succeeded in imitating the temper of an ancient bronze sword, but no details are given as to whether he added more than the usual proportion of tin to his copper, or whether he hardened the edge with a hammer.

With regard to the other reasons adduced by Mr. Gladstone, it is no doubt true that χαλκὸς is occasionally spoken of by Homer as a pure metal, mainly, however, it may be argued, in consequence of the same name being applied to both copper and bronze, if not, indeed, like the Latin “æs,” to copper, bronze, and brass. We find, moreover, that tin, for thus we must translate κασσίτερος, is mentioned by Homer; and as this metal appears in ancient times to have been mainly, though not exclusively, employed for the purpose of alloying copper, we must from this fact infer that the use of bronze was not unknown. In the celebrated description of the fashioning of the shield of Achilles by Vulcan—which may for the moment be assumed to be of the same age as the rest of the Iliad—we find the copper and tin mentioned in juxtaposition with each other; and if it had been intended to represent Hephaistos as engaged in mixing and melting bronze, the description could not have been more complete.[41]

Χαλκὸς δ̓ έν πυρὶ βάλλεν ἀτειρέα, κασσίτερόν τε.

Even the term indomitable may refer to the difficulty of melting copper in its unalloyed condition.

But tin was also used in the pure condition. In the breast-plate of Agamemnon[42] there were ten bands of black κύανος, twelve of gold, and twenty of tin. In his shield[43] were twenty bosses of tin. The cows[44] on the shield of Achilles were[13] made of both gold and tin, and his greaves[45] of soft tin, and the border of the breast-plate of Asteropæus[46] was formed of glittering tin.

This collocation of various metals, or inlaying them by way of ornament, calls to mind some of the pottery and bronze pins of the Swiss Lake dwellings, which are decorated with inlaid tin, and the remarkable bronze bracelet found at Mœrigen,[47] which is inlaid with iron and a yellow brass by way of ornament.

With regard to the epithets red, bright, and gleaming, they are perfectly applicable to bronze in its polished condition, though they ill assort with the popular idea of bronze, which usually assigns to that metal the brown or greenish hues it acquires by oxidation and exposure to atmospheric influences. As a matter of fact, the red colour[48] of copper, though certainly rendered more yellow, is not greatly impaired by an admixture of tin within the proportions now used by engineers, viz. up to about two and a half ounces to the pound, or about 15 per cent. As to the bright and shining properties of the metal, Virgil, when no doubt speaking of bronze swords and shields, makes special mention of their glitter—[49]

“Æratæque micant peltæ, micat æreus ensis.”

Indeed, the mere fact of the swords of Homer being made of χαλκὸς is in favour of that metal being bronze, as pure copper would be singularly inapplicable to such a purpose, and certainly no copper sword would break into three or four pieces at a blow instead of being merely bent.[50]

The bending of the points of the spear-heads against the shields of the adversaries is, however, in favour of these weapons having been of copper rather than of bronze.[51]

As to Homer having been unacquainted with the fusion or alloying of metals, it may fairly be urged that without such knowledge it would have been impossible to work so freely as he has described, in gold, silver, and tin; and that the only reason for which Vulcan could have thrown the latter metal into the fire must have been in order to melt it.

[14]

Whether steel was designated by the term κύανος is a matter of considerable doubt, and certainly in later times that word was applied to a substance occasionally used as a blue pigment, not improbably a dark blue carbonate of copper. Assuming the word to mean a metal, the difficulty in regarding it as significant of steel appears in a great measure due to the colour implied by the adjective form κύανεος, being a dark blue.[52] If, however, it were the custom even in those days to colour steel blue by exposing it, after it had been polished, to a certain degree of heat—as is usually done with watch and clock springs at the present day—the deep blue colour of the sky or sea might well receive such an epithet. That steel of some kind was known in Homeric days is abundantly evident from the process of hardening an axe by dipping it in cold water while heated, which is so graphically described in the Odyssey.

If κύανος be really steel, we can also understand the epithet black[53] being occasionally applied to it, even though the adjective derived from it had the signification of blue.

According to the Arundelian Marbles, iron was discovered b.c. 1432,[54] or 248 years before the taking of Troy, but though we have occasional mention of this metal and of steel in the Homeric poems, yet weapons and tools of bronze are far more commonly mentioned and described. Trees, for instance, are cut down and wood carved with tools of bronze; and the battle-axe of Menelaus[55] is of excellent bronze with an olive-wood handle, long and well polished.

Before noticing further the early use of iron in Greece, it will be well to see what other authors than Homer say as to the origin and ancient use of bronze in that country.

The name of the principal metal of which it is composed, copper, bears witness to one of the chief sources of its supply having been the island of Cyprus. It would appear that Tamassus in this island was in ancient times a noted mart for this metal, as it is according to Nitzsch and other critics the Temese[56] mentioned in Homer as being resorted to in order to exchange iron for χαλκὸς, which in this as well as some other passages seems to stand for copper and not bronze.

The advantage arising from mixing a proportion of tin with the[15] copper, and thus rendering it at the same time more fusible and harder, must have been known before the dawn of Grecian history.

The accounts given by early Greek writers as to the first discoverer of the art of making bronze by an admixture of copper and tin vary considerably, and thus prove that even in the days when these notices were written the art was of ancient date.

Theophrastus makes Delas, a Phrygian, whom Aristotle[57] regards as a Lydian, to have been the inventor of bronze. Pausanias[58] ascribes the honour of first casting statues in bronze to Rhœcus and Theodorus the Samians, who appear to have lived about 640 b.c. They are also said to have improved the accuracy of casting, but no doubt the process on a smaller scale was practised long before their time. Rhœcus and his colleague are also reported to have discovered the art of casting iron,[59] but no really ancient objects of cast iron have as yet been discovered.

The invention of the metals gold, silver, and copper is also ascribed to the Idæan Dactyli,[60] or the Telchines, who made the sickle of Chronos[61] and the trident of Poseidon.[62]

Though, as has already been observed, iron and even steel were not unknown in the days of Homer, both seem to have been of considerable rarity, and it is by no means improbable that, as appears to have been the case with the Egyptians, the first iron used by the Greeks was of meteoric origin. I have elsewhere[63] called attention to the possible connection of the Greek name for iron (σίδηρος) with ἀστήρ, often applied to a shooting-star or meteor, and with the Latin Sidera and the English Star, though it is unsafe to insist too much on mere verbal similarity. In an interesting article on the use of meteoric iron by Dr. L. Beck,[64] of Biebrich on the Rhine, the suggestion is made that the final ηρος of σίδηρος is a form of the Aryan ais (conf. æs, æris). Dr. Beck, however, inclines to the opinion that the recognition of certain meteorites as iron was first made at a time subsequent to the discovery of the means of smelting iron from its ore.

The self-fused mass or disc of iron,[65] σόλον αὐτοχόωνον, which formed one of the prizes at the funeral games of Patroclus, may possibly have been meteoric, but this is very doubtful, as the forging of iron, and the trouble and care it involved, were well[16] known in those days, as is evident from the epithet πολύκμητος so often bestowed upon that metal.

For a considerable time after the Homeric period bronze remained in use for offensive weapons, especially for those intended for piercing rather than cutting, such as spears, lances, and arrows, as well as for those which were merely defensive, such as shields, cuirasses, helmets, and greaves. Even swords were also sometimes of bronze, or at all events the tradition of their use was preserved by the poets. Thus we find Euripides[66] speaking of the bronze-speared Trojans, χαλκεγχέων Τρώων, and Virgil[67] describing the glitter of the bronze swords of some of the host of Turnus.

Probably, however, the use of the word χαλκὸς was not restricted to copper or bronze, but also came in time to mean metal in general, and thus extended to iron, a worker in which metal was, as we have already seen, termed a χαλκεύς.

The succession of iron to bronze is fully recognised by both Greek and Latin authors. The passage in Hesiod,[68] where he speaks of the third generation of men who had arms of bronze and houses of bronze, who ploughed with bronze, for the black iron did not exist, is already hackneyed; nor is the record of Lucretius[69] less well known:—

“Arma antiqua, manus, ungues, dentesque fuerunt,
Et lapides, et item sylvarum fragmina rami, ...
Posterius ferri vis est, ærisque reperta,
Sed prior æris erat quam ferri cognitus usus; ...
Inde minutatim processit ferreus ensis,
Versaque in opprobrium species est falcis ahenæ,
Et ferro cœpere solum proscindere terræ.”

The difference between the age of Homer and Hesiod in respect to the use of metals is well described by Mr. Gladstone. The former[70] “lived at a time when the use of iron (in Greece) was just commencing, when the commodity was rare, and when its value was very great;” but in the days of Hesiod “iron, as compared with copper, had come to be the inferior, that is to say the cheaper metal,” and the poet “looks back from his iron age with an admiring envy on the heroic period.”

[17]

Hesiod gives to Hercules[71] a helmet of steel and a sword of iron, and to Saturn[72] a steel reaping-hook. His remark that at the feast of the gods the withered[73] part of a five-fingered branch should never be cut from the green part by black iron, shows that this metal was in common use, and that for religious ceremonies the older metal bronze retained its place.

Bronze was, however, a favourite metal with the poet, if not indeed in actual use long after iron was known,[74] for Pindar, about b.c. 470, still frequently cites spears and axes made of bronze.

By the time of Herodotus, who wrote before 400 b.c., the use of iron and steel was universal among the Greeks. He instances, as a fact worth recording, that the Massagetæ,[75] a powerful tribe which occupied the steppes on the east of the Caspian, made no use of iron or silver, but had an abundance of χαλκὸς and gold, pointing their spears and arrows and forming the heads of their battle-axes with the former metal. Among the Æthiopians,[76] on the contrary, he states that bronze was rarer and more precious than gold; nor was it in use among the Scythians.[77] The Sagartii[78] in the army of Xerxes are mentioned as not carrying arms either of bronze or iron except daggers, as if bronze were still of not unfrequent use.

Strabo,[79] at a much later date, thinks it worth while to record that among the Lusitanians the spears were tipped with bronze.

But certainly some centuries before the time of Herodotus, and probably as early as that of Homer, the Chalybes on the shores of the Euxine practised the manufacture of iron on a considerable scale, and from them came the Greek name for steel, χαλυψ.[80] Daïmachus, in the fourth century b.c., records that different sorts of steel are produced among the Chalybes in Sinope, Lydia, and Laconia. That of Sinope was used for smiths’ and carpenters’ tools; that of Laconia for files, drills for iron, stamps, and masons’ tools; and the Lydian kind for files, swords, razors, and knives. In Laconia iron is said to have formed the only currency in the days of Lycurgus.

Taking all the evidence into consideration, there can be no doubt that iron must have been known in Greece some ten or twelve centuries before our era, though, as already observed, it was at that time an extremely rare metal. It also appears that as[18] early as b.c. 500, or even 600, iron or steel was in common use, though bronze had not been altogether superseded for offensive arms such as spear-heads and battle-axes.

The tradition of the earlier use of bronze still, however, remained even in later times, and the preference shown for its employment in religious rites, which I have mentioned elsewhere,[81] is a strong witness of this earlier use. It seems needless again to do more than mention the bronze ploughshare used at the foundation of Tuscan cities, the bronze knives and shears of the Sabine and Roman priests, and the bronze sickles of Medea and Elissa. I must, however, again bring forward the speculations of an intelligent Greek traveller, who wrote in the latter half of the second century of our era, as to the existence of what we should now term a Bronze Age in Greece.

Pausanias[82] relates how Lichas the Lacedæmonian, in the fifth century b.c., discovered the bones of Orestes, which his countrymen had been commanded by an oracle to seek. The Pythia[83] had described the place as one where two strong winds met, where form was opposed to form, and one evil lay upon another. These Lichas recognised in the two bellows of the smith, the hammer opposed to the anvil, and the iron lying on it. Pausanias on this observes that at that time they had already begun to use iron in war, and that if it had been in the days of the heroes it would have been bronze and not iron designated by the oracle as the evil, for in their days all arms were of bronze. For this he cites Homer as his authority, who speaks of the bronze axe of Pisander, and the arrow of Meriones. A farther argument he derives from the spear of Achilles, laid up in the temple of Minerva at Phaselis, and the sword of Memnon in that of Æsculapius at Nicomedia, which is entirely of bronze, while the ferrule and point of his spear are also of that metal.

The spear-head which lay with the bones of Theseus[84] in the Isle of Scyros was also of bronze, and probably the sword likewise. There are no works of Latin authors of a date nearly so remote as that of the earlier Greek writers, and long before the days of Ennius, iron was in general use in Italy. If the Articles of Peace which “Porsena, King of the Tuscans, tendered unto the people of Rome” were as Pliny[85] represents them, the Romans[19] must even in those early days have had iron weapons, for they were forbidden the use of that metal except for tilling the ground. In b.c. 224 the Isumbrian Gauls who fought with Flaminius were already in possession of iron swords, the softness and flexibility of which led to the discomfiture of their owners. The Romans themselves seem but to have been badly armed so far as swords were concerned until the time of the Second Punic War, about b.c. 200, when they adopted the Spanish sword, and learnt the method of preparing it. Whether the modern Toledo and Bilbao blades are legitimate descendants of these old weapons we need not stop to inquire. In whatever manner the metal was prepared, so thoroughly was iron identified with the sword in classical times that ferrum and gladius were almost synonyms.

Pliny mentions that the best steel used in Rome was imported from China, a country in which copper or bronze swords are said to have been in use in the days of Ki,[86] the son of Yu, b.c. 2197-48, and those of iron under Kung-Kia, b.c. 1897-48, so that there also history points to a Bronze Age. But this by the way.

Looking at the fact that iron and steel were in such general use at Rome during the period of her wars in Western Europe, we may well believe that had any of the tribes with which the Roman forces came in contact been armed with bronze, such an unusual circumstance could hardly have escaped record. In the Augustan age the iron swords of Noricum were in great repute, and farther north in Germany, though iron did not abound, it was, according to Tacitus, used for spears and swords. The Catti had the metal in abundance, but among the Aestii, on the right coast of the Baltic, it was scarce. The Cimbrians in the first century b.c. had, according to Plutarch,[87] iron breast-plates, javelins, and large swords.

The Gauls of the North of France had in the time of Julius Cæsar[88] large iron mines which they worked by tunnelling; the bolts of their ships were made of that metal, and they had even chain cables of iron. The Britons of the South of England who were in such close communication with the opposite coast of Gaul must have had an equal acquaintance with iron. Cæsar mentions ingots or rings of iron as being used for money, and observes that iron is obtained on the sea-coast, but in small quantities, and adds that bronze was imported.[89] Strabo includes iron, as well as gold, silver, and corn, among the products of Britain. In Spain,[20] as already mentioned, iron had long been known, so that from the concurrent testimony of several historians we may safely infer that in the time of Julius Cæsar, when this country was first exposed to Roman influences, it had already, like the neighbouring countries to the south, passed from the Bronze into the Iron Age.

Notwithstanding all this historical testimony in favour of the prior use of bronze to that of iron, there have been not a few authors who have maintained that the idea of a succession of stone, bronze, and iron is delusive when applied to Western Europe. Among these was the late Mr. Thomas Wright, who has gone so far as to express[90] “a firm conviction that not a bit of bronze which has been found in the British Islands belongs to an older date than that at which Cæsar wrote that the Britons obtained their bronze from abroad, meaning of course from Gaul.” “In fact these objects in bronze were Roman in character and in their primary origin.” As in the same page he goes on to show that two hundred years before Christ the swords of the Gauls were made of iron, and as his contentions have already been met by Sir John Lubbock,[91] and will, I think, be effectually disposed of by the facts subsequently to be mentioned in this volume, it seems needless to dwell on Mr. Wright’s opinions. I may, however, mention that,[92] while denying the antiquity of British, German, and Scandinavian weapons and tools of bronze, he admits that in Greece and Italy that metal was for a long period the only one employed for cutting instruments, as iron was not known in Greece until a comparatively late date.

About one hundred and thirty years ago,[93] in 1751, a discussion as to the date of bronze weapons took place among the members of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres of Paris, on the occasion of some bronze swords, a spear-head, and other objects being found near Gannat, in the Bourbonnais. Some antiquaries regarded them as weapons made for use; others as merely made for show. The Count de Caylus considered that the swords were Roman, though maintaining that copper or bronze must have been in earlier use than iron. Lévesque de la Ravalière maintained, on the contrary, that neither the Greeks, Romans, Gauls, nor Franks had ever made use of copper or bronze in their swords. The Abbé Barthélemy showed from ancient authors that the[21] earliest arms of the Greeks were of bronze; that iron was only introduced about the time of the siege of Troy; and that in later times among the Romans there was no mention of bronze having been used for weapons of offence, and therefore that these swords were not Roman. Strangely enough, he went on to argue that they were Frankish, and of the time of Childeric. Had he been present at the opening of the tomb of that monarch in 1653 he would, however, have seen that he had an iron sword.[94]

A still warmer discussion than any which has taken place in England or France, one, in fact, almost amounting to an international war of words, has in more recent times arisen between some of the German antiquaries and those of the Scandinavian kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden.

So early as 1860[95] my friend Dr. Ludwig Lindenschmit, of Mainz, had commenced his attack on “the so-called Bronze Period,” and shown a disposition to regard all bronze antiquities of northern countries as of Italian origin, or, if made in the countries where found, as mere homely imitations of imported articles. Not content with this, he in 1875[96] again mustered his forces and renewed the campaign in even a more formal manner. He found a formidable ally in Dr. Hostmann, whose comments on Dr. Hans Hildebrand’s “Heathen Period in Sweden” are well worth the reading, and contain a vast amount of interesting information.

Dr. Hostmann’s method of dealing with Dr. Hans Hildebrand brought Dr. Sophus Müller[97] to the rescue, with whom Dr. Lindenschmit[98] at once grappled. Shortly after Dr. Hostmann[99] again appears upon the scene, and before engaging with Dr. Sophus Müller goes so far as to argue that while Greek swords of iron are known to belong to the eighth century B.C., no bronze sword of that country can with safety be assigned to an earlier date than the sixth century, and, indeed, these may have been only weapons of parade, or possibly funereal offerings in lieu of efficient swords. Rector Genthe[100] also engages in the fight upon the same side.

These three antagonists bring Sophus Müller[101] again to the front, and as one great argument of his opponents was that bronze objects could not be produced with the finish and ornamentation which is found upon them without the use of iron and[22] steel tools, he brings forward an official document signed by four authorities in the museum at Copenhagen, and stating that precisely similar ornamentation to the spirals, zigzags, and punched lines which occur on Scandinavian bronze antiquities had been produced in their presence by a workman using bronze tools only on a plate of bronze. Both plate and tools were of the same alloy, viz. 9 of copper to 1 of tin.

On this a final charge is made by Professor Hostmann[102] and Dr. Lindenschmit, the former of whom produces a kind of affidavit from the late director of the Polytechnic School at Hanover and the court medallist of the same town, to the effect that certain kinds of punched work cannot be produced with bronze punches, and the editors of the Archiv think it best to close the discussion after Dr. Lindenschmit’s final retort.

I have not thought it worth while to enter into all the details of this controversy, as even to summarise them would occupy more room than I could spare. It seems to me, however, that a considerable amount of misconception must have existed in the minds of some of the disputants, both as to the accepted meaning of the term Bronze Age, as applied not chronologically, but to a certain stage of civilisation, and as to the limitation of the objects which can with propriety be referred to that age. No antiquary of experience will deny that many bronze ornaments, and even some bronze weapons, remained in use long after iron and even steel were known, any more than he would deny that the use of stone for certain purposes continued not only after bronze was known, but even after iron and steel were in general use, and, in fact, up to the present time, not only in barbarian but in civilised countries. Our flint strike-a-lights and our burnishers are still of much the same character as they were some thousands of years ago, and afford convincing instances of this persistent use.

The real question at issue is not whether any bronze weapons co-existed with those of iron and steel in Western Europe, but whether any of them were there in use at a period when iron and steel were unknown. Moreover, it is not a question as to whence the knowledge of bronze was derived, nor whether at the time the Scandinavians or Britons were using bronze for their tools and weapons, the inhabitants of Greece and Italy were already acquainted with iron and steel; but it is a question whether in each individual country there arrived a time when bronze came into[23] use and for certain purposes superseded stone, while iron and steel were practically unknown.

This is a question to be solved by evidence, though in the nature of things that evidence must to some extent be of a negative character. When barrow after barrow is opened, and weapons of bronze and stone only are found accompanying the interments, and not a trace of iron or steel; when hoards of rough metal and broken bronze, together with the moulds of the bronze-founder and some of his stock-in-trade, are disinterred, and there is no trace of an iron tool among them—the presumption is strong that at the time when these men and these hoards were buried iron was not in use. When, moreover, by a careful examination of the forms of bronze instruments we can trace a certain amount of development which is in keeping with the peculiar properties of bronze and not with those of iron, and we can thus to some extent fix a kind of chronological succession in these forms, the inference is that this evolution of form, which must have required a considerable amount of time, took place without its course being affected by any introduction of a fresh and qualifying influence in the shape of iron tools and weapons.

When, however, in various countries we find interments and even cemeteries in which bronze and iron weapons and instruments are intermingled, and the forms of those in bronze are what we have learnt from other sources to regard as the latest, while the forms in iron are not those for which that metal is best adapted, but are almost servile copies of the bronze instruments found with them, the proof of the one having succeeded the other is almost absolutely conclusive.

The lessons taught by such cemeteries as that at Hallstatt, in Austria, and by our own Late Celtic interments, such as those at Arras, in Yorkshire, are of the highest importance in this question.

It is not, however, to be supposed that even in countries by no means geographically remote from each other the introduction either of iron or bronze must of necessity have taken place at one and the same chronological period. Near the shores of the Mediterranean the use of each metal no doubt prevailed far earlier than in any of the northern countries of Europe; and though the knowledge of metals probably spread from certain centres, its progress can have been but slow, for in each part of Europe there appears to have been some special development, particularly in the forms of bronze instruments, and there is no absolute uniformity in their[24] types extending over any large area. In each country the process of manufacture was carried on, and though some commerce in tools and arms of bronze no doubt took place between neighbouring tribes, yet as a rule there are local peculiarities characteristic of special districts.

So marked are these that a practised archæologist can in almost all cases, on inspection of a group of bronze antiquities, fix with some degree of confidence the country in which they were found. To this rule Britain offers no exception, and though some forms of instruments were no doubt imported, yet, as will subsequently be seen, our types are for the most part indigenous.

As to the ornamentation of bronze by bronze tools, I have seen none in this country on objects which I should refer to the Bronze Age but what could have been effected by means of bronze punches, of which indeed examples have been discovered in bronze-founders’ hoards in France,[103] and what are probably such also in Britain. Such ornamentation is, however, simple compared with that on many of the Danish forms, and yet I have seen the complicated Scandinavian ornaments accurately and sharply reproduced by Dr. Otto Tischler, by means of bronze tools only, on bronze of the ordinary ancient alloy.

But even supposing that iron and steel were known during some part of the so-called Bronze Age, I do not see in what manner it would affect the main features of the case or the interest attaching to the bronze objects which I am about to describe. “De non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio” is a maxim of some weight in archæology as well as in law; and in the absence of iron and all trace of its influence, it matters but little whether it was known or not, except in so far as a neglect of its use would argue some want of intelligence on the part of those who did not avail themselves of so useful a metal. It will be seen hereafter that some of the objects described in these pages actually do belong to an Iron Period, and nothing could better illustrate the transition of one Period into another, or the overlapping of the Bronze Age upon that of Iron, than the fact that in these pages devoted to the Bronze Period I must of necessity describe many objects which were still in use when iron and steel were superseding bronze, in the same manner as in my “Ancient Stone Implements” I was forced to describe many forms, such as battle-axes, arrow-heads, and bracers, which avowedly belonged to the Bronze Period.

[25]

A point which is usually raised by those who maintain the priority of the use of iron to that of bronze is, that inasmuch as it is more readily oxidized and dissolved by acids naturally present in the soil, iron may have disappeared, and indeed has done so, while bronze has been left; so that the absence of iron as an accompaniment to all early interments counts for nothing. Professor Rolleston,[104] in a paper on the three periods known as the Iron, the Bronze, and the Stone Ages, has well dealt with this point; and observes that in some graves of the Bronze Period the objects contained are incrusted with carbonate of lime, which would have protected any iron instrument of the Bronze Period as well as it has done those of Saxon times. Not only are the iron weapons discovered in Saxon cemeteries often in almost perfect preservation, but on the sites of Roman occupation whole hoards of iron tools have been found but little injured by rust. The fact that at Hallstatt and other places in which graves have been examined belonging to the transitional period, when both iron and bronze were in use together, the weapons and tools of iron, though oxidized, still retain their form and character as completely as those in bronze, also affords strong ground for believing that had iron been present with bronze in other early interments it would also have been preserved. The importance attaching to the reputed occurrence of bronze swords with Roman coins as late as the time of Magnentius cannot be better illustrated than by a discovery of my own in the ancient cemetery of Hallstatt. In company with Sir John Lubbock I was engaged in opening a grave in which we had come to an interment of the Early Iron Age, accompanied by a socketed celt and spear-heads of iron, when amidst the bones I caught sight of a thin metallic disc of a yellowish colour which looked like a coin. Up to that time no coin had ever been found in any one of the many hundred graves which had been examined, and I eagerly picked up this disc. It proved to be a “sechser,” or six-kreutzer piece, with the date 1826, which by some means had worked its way down among the crevices in the stony ground, and which from its appearance had evidently been buried some years. Had this coin been of Roman date it might have afforded an argument for bringing down the date of the Hallstatt cemetery some centuries in the chronological scale. As it is, it affords a wholesome caution against drawing important inferences from the mere collocation[26] of objects when there is any possibility of the apparent association being only due to accident.

In further illustration of the succession of the three Ages of Stone, Bronze, and Iron in Western Europe, I might go on to cite cases of the actual superposition of the objects of one age over those of another, such as has been observed in several barrows and in the well-known instance of the cone of La Tinière, in the Lake of Geneva, recorded by Morlot.

It will, however, be thought that enough, if not more than enough, has already been said on the general question of a Bronze Age in a book particularly devoted to the weapons and instruments of bronze found in the British Isles. It is now time to proceed with the examination and description of their various forms; and in doing this I propose to treat separately, so far as possible, the different classes of instruments intended each for some special purpose, and at the same time to point out their analogies with instruments of the same character found in other parts of Europe. Their chronological sequence so far as it can be ascertained, the position in time of the Bronze Period of Britain and Ireland, and the sources from which our bronze civilisation was derived, will be discussed in a concluding chapter.

I begin with the instrument of the most common occurrence, the so-called celt.

---

CHAPTER II.

CELTS.

Of all the forms of bronze instruments the hatchet or axe, to which the name of celt has been applied, is perhaps the most common and the best known. It is also probably among the earliest of the instruments fabricated from metal, though in this country it is possible that some of the cutting instruments, such as the knife-daggers, which required a less amount of metal for their formation, are of equal or greater antiquity.

These tools or weapons—for, like the American tomahawk, they seem to have been in use for peaceful as well as warlike purposes—may be divided into several classes. Celts may be described as flat; flanged, or having ribs along the sides; winged, or having the side flanges extended so as almost to form a socket for the handle on either side of the blade, to which variety the name of palstave has been given; and socketed. Of most of these classes there are several varieties, as will be seen farther on.

The name of celt which has been given to these instruments is derived from the doubtful Latin word “celtis” or “celtes,” a chisel, which is in its turn said to be derived à cœlando (from carving), and to be the equivalent of cœlum.

The only author in whose works the word is found is St. Jerome, and it is employed both in his Vulgate translation of the Book of Job[105] and in a quotation from that book in his Epistle to Pammachius. The word also occurs in an inscription recorded by Gruter and Aldus,[106] but as this inscription is a modern forgery, it does not add to the authority of the word “celtis.”

Mr. Knight Watson, Sec. S. A., in an interesting paper communicated to the Society of Antiquaries of London,[107] has given[28] several details as to the origin and use of this word, which he considers to have been founded on a misreading of the word certe, and the derivation of which from cœlo he regards as impossible. There can be no doubt, as Beger pointed out two centuries ago, that a number of MSS. of the Vulgate read certe instead of celte in the passage in Job already mentioned, and that in all probability these are the most ancient and the best. But this only adds to the difficulty of understanding how a recently invented and an unknown word, such as celte is presumed to be, can have ever supplanted a well-known word like certe; and so far as the Burial Service of the Roman Catholic Church is concerned can have maintained its ground for centuries. Nor is this difficulty diminished when we consider that the ordinary and proper translation of the Hebrew לֹער is either “in æternum” or “in testimonium,” according as the word is pointed לָעַר or לְעֵר, and that, so far as I am aware, there is no other instance of its being translated “certe.” On the other hand, a nearly similar word, פְעֵס “with a stylus,” or, as it is translated, “a pen,” occurs in the same passage; and assuming that this was by some accident read for לער by St. Jerome, he would have thought that the word for stylus was used twice over, and have inserted some word to designate a graving tool, by way of a synonym. The probability of such an error would be increased if his MS. had the lines arranged in couplets in accordance with its poetical character, the passage standing thus when un-pointed:—

עפרתו ברול בעס
יתצבון בַצזר לער

Very possibly the word used by St. Jerome may not have been celte but cœlo, and the corruption into celte in order to make a distinction between heaven and a chisel would then at all events have been possible.

The other contention involves two extreme improbabilities—the one, that St. Jerome, having in his second revision of the Bible translated the passage as “in testimonium in petris sculpantur,” should in the Vulgate have given the inaccurate rendering “certe sculpantur in silice;” the other and the more extreme of the two, that the well-known word certe should have been ousted by a word like celte had it been utterly new-fangled.

Under any view of the case there are considerable difficulties, but as the word celt has now obtained a firm hold in our language, it will be convenient to retain it, whatever its origin or derivation.

[29]

It has been the fashion among some who are fond of novelties to call these instruments “kelts,” possibly from some mental association of the instruments with a Celtic or Keltic population. From some such cause also some of the French antiquaries must have coined the new plural to the word, Celtœ. Even in this country it has been said[108] with regard to “the ancient weapon denominated the celt,” “Our antiquarians have commonly ascribed them to the ancient Celtæ, and hence have given them this unmeaning appellation.” If any one prefers pronouncing celt as “kelt,” or celestial as “kelestial,” let him do so; but at all events let us adhere to the old spelling. How the Romans of the time of St. Jerome would have pronounced the word cœlum or celtis may be inferred from the punning line of Ausonius with regard to Venus.[109]

“Orta salo, suscepta solo, patre edita cœlo.”

The first author of modern times whose use of the word in connection with Celts I can trace is Beger, who, in his “Thesaurus Brandenburgicus”[110] (1696), gives an engraving of a celt of the palstave form, under the title Celtes, together with the following dialogue:—

“Et nomen et instrumentum mihi obscurum est, infit Archæophilus; Instrumentum Statuariorum est, respondit Dulodorus, qui simulacra ex Cera, Alabastro, aliisque lapidum generibus cædunt et poliunt. Græcis dicitur Ἐγκοπεὺς, quâ voce Lucianus usus est in Somnio, ubi cum lusum non insuavem dixisset, Deos sculpere, et parva quædam simulacra adornare, addit ἐγκοπέα γὰρ τινά μοι δοὺς, scilicet avunculus, id quod Joh. Benedictus vertit, Celte datâ. Celte? excepit Archæophilus; at nisi fallor hæc vox Latinis incognita est? Habetur, inquit Dulodorus, in versione vulgatâ Libri Hiob c. 19 quamvis alii non Celte, sed Certe ibi legant, quod tamen minus quadrat. Quicquid sit, instrumentum Statuariorum hoc esse, ex formâ patet, figuris incidendis aptissima; neque enim opinio Molineti videtur admittenda, qui Securim appellat, cum nullus aptandi manubrii locus huic faveat. Metallum reposuit Archæophilus, minus videtur convenire. Instrumentum hoc ex ære est, quod duritiem lapidum nescio an superare potuerit? Uti lapides diversi sunt, regessit Dulodorus, ita diversa fuisse etiam metalla instrumentorum iis[30] cædendis destinatorum, facilè cesserim. Vet. Gloss. Celtem instrumentum ferreum dicit proculdubio quòd durioribus lapidibus ferreum chalybe munitum servierit. Hoc autem non obstat, ut æreum vel ceris, vel terris, vel lapidibus mollioribus fuerit adhibitum. Si tamen res Tibi minus probetur, me non contradicente, molliori vocabulo γλυφεῖον cœlum poteris et appellare et credere. Γλυφεῖα etiam Statuariorum instrumenta fuisse, ex allegato modò Luciano planum est, ubi Humanitas, si me relinquis, inquit, σχῆμα δουλοπρεπὲς ἀναλήψη, καὶ μολία, καὶ γλυφεῖα, καὶ κοπέας, καὶ κολαπτῆρας ἐν ταῖν χεροῖν ἕξεις, habitum servilem assumes, Vectes, COELA, CELTES, Scalpra præ manibus habebis.”

The idea of a bronze celt being a statuary’s chisel for carving in wax, alabaster, and the softer kinds of stone will seem the less absurd if we remember that, at the time when Beger wrote, the manner in which such instruments were hafted was unknown, and that all antiquities of bronze were generally regarded as being of Roman or Greek origin.

Dr. Olaf Worm, a Danish antiquary of the seventeenth century, was more enlightened than Beger, for in his “Museum Wormianum,”[111] published in 1655, he states his belief that bronze weapons had formerly been in use in Denmark, and cites two flat or flanged celts, or cunei, as he calls them, found in Jutland, which he regards as hand weapons for close encounters. He also was, nevertheless, at a loss to know how they were hafted, for he adds that had they but been provided with shaft-holes he should have considered them to have been axes.

In a work treating of the bronze antiquities of Britain we must, however, first consider the opinion of British antiquaries, by whom the word celt had been completely adopted as the name for bronze hatchets and axes by the middle of the last century. Borlase,[112] in his “Antiquities of Cornwall,” 1754, speaking of some “spear-heads” of copper mentioned by Leland, says that by the spear-heads he certainly meant those which we (from Begerus) now call Celts. Leland’s words are as follows:[113]—“There was found of late Yeres syns Spere Heddes, Axis for Warre, and Swerdes of coper wrapped up in lynid scant perished nere the Mount in S. Hilaries Paroch in Tynne Works;” so that it by no means follows but that he was right in speaking of spear-heads, for if there were any celts among the objects discovered they were probably termed battle-axes by Leland.

[31]

Camden makes mention of the same find:[114] “At the foote of this mountaine (St. Michael’s Mount), within the memorie of our Fathers, whiles men were digging up of tin, they found Spear-heads, axes, and swordes of brasse wrapped in linnen, such as were sometimes found within the forrest of Hercinia in Germanie, and not long since in our Wales. For evident it is by the monuments of ancient Writers that the Greeks, the Cimbrians, and the Britans used brazen weapons, although the wounds given with brasse bee lesse hurtfull, as in which mettall there is a medicinable vertue to heale, according as Macrobius reporteth out of Aristotle. But happily that age was not so cunning in devising meanes to mischiefe and murthers as ours is.”

Hearne, the editor of Leland’s “Itinerary,” took a less philosophical view of these instruments. Writing to Thoresby[115] in 1709, he maintains that some old instruments of bronze found near Bramham Moor, Yorkshire, are not the heads of British spears; on the contrary, they are Roman, not axes used in their sacrifices, nor the heads of spears and javelins, but chisels which were used to cut and polish the stones in their tents. Such instruments were also used in making the Roman highways and in draining their fens.

Plot[116] also, at a somewhat earlier date, asserted a Roman origin for bronze celts, which he regarded as the heads of bolts, founding his opinion mainly on two, which are engraved in the Museum Moscardi. These, which are reproduced in the Archæologia, vol. v. Pl. VIII. 18 and 19, are of the palstave form, and were regarded by Moscardo[117] as the heads of great darts to be thrown from a catapult. A flat celt found in Staffordshire,[118] Plot takes to be the head of a Roman securis with which the Popæ slew their sacrifices.

Rowland,[119] in his “Mona Antiqua Restaurata,” 1723, suggested that looped palstaves fastened by a thong to a staff might be used as war flails.

The imaginative Dr. Stukeley, in the year 1724, communicated to the Society of Antiquaries a discourse on the use of celts, which is to be found in the Minute Book of the Society. An abstract of it is given by Mr. Lort[120] in his paper subsequently mentioned.[32] Dr. Stukeley undertook to show that celts were British and appertaining to the Druids, who, when not using them to cut off the boughs of oak and mistletoe, put them in their pouches, or hung them to their girdles by the little ring or loop at the side. In a more sensible manner he divided them into two classes, the recipient and the received; that is to say, the socketed, in which the handle was received, and the flat and palstave forms, which entered into a notch in the handle.

Borlase,[121] notwithstanding that he was under the impression that a number of socketed celts found at Karnbrê in 1744 were accompanied by Roman coins, one of them at least as late as the time of Constantius I., did “not take them to be purely Roman, foreign, or of Italian invention and workmanship.”

He argues that the Romans of Italy would not have made such instruments of brass after Julius Cæsar’s time, when the superior hardness of iron was so well understood, and that metal was so easily to be procured. Farther, that no representations of such weapons occur on the Trajan or Antonine Columns, that few specimens exist in the cabinets of the curious in Italy, where they are regarded as Transalpine antiquities, and that none have been found among the ruins of Herculaneum;[122] nor are any published in the Museum Romanum or the Museum Kircherianum. He concludes that they were made and used in Britain, but that though they were originally of British invention and fabric, they were for the most part made when the Britons had improved their arts under their Roman masters, as most of them seem too correct and shapely for the Britons before the Julian conquest.

As to the uses of celts, Borlase cites the various opinions of the learned, and observes that if they had not been advanced by men of learning it would be scarce excusable to mention some of them, much less to refute them. They had been taken for heads of walking staffs, for chisels to cut stone withal (as such instruments must have been absolutely necessary in making the great Roman roads), as tools with which to engrave letters and inscriptions, as the sickles with which the Druids cut the sacred mistletoe, and as rests to support the lituus of the Roman augurs. After all, however, Borlase himself comes to the somewhat lame conclusion that they formed the head or arming of the spear, the javelin, or the[33] arrow, and thinks that Mr. Rowland comes the nearest to the truth of any author he has read, when he says that they might be used with a string to draw them back, and something like a feather to guide them in flying towards the enemy, and calls them sling-hatchets. He concedes, however, that for such weighty heads there was no occasion for feathers, and as for slinging of hatchets against an enemy, he does not remember any instance, ancient or modern. Some of the celts, moreover, are too light to do any execution if thrown from the hand.

The Rev. Mr. Lort,[123] who communicated some observations on celts to the Society of Antiquaries in 1776, differed from Dr. Borlase, and regarded a large flat celt found in the Lower Furness as manifestly designed to be held in the hand only, and much better adapted to the chipping of stone than to any other use which has hitherto been found out for it. He will not, however, take upon himself to assert that some socketed celts, which he also describes, were designed for the same purpose. Appended to the paper by Mr. Lort are notices of several bronze celts, which at different times had been brought under the notice of the Society of Antiquaries. Some which had been exhibited in 1735 were regarded by Mr. Benjamin Cooke and Mr. Collinson as Gaulish weapons used by the Roman auxiliaries at the time of Claudius. Mr. Cooke, however, took them to be axes, and mounted one of them on a shaft, citing Homer as his authority for doing so, and speaking of the ἀξίνην ἔυχαλκον.

The Rev. Samuel Pegge in 1787 makes some pertinent remarks respecting celts in a letter to Mr. Lort, which is published in the Archæologia.[124] He points out that from some of them having been found in barrows associated with spear-heads of flint, it is probable that some at least were military weapons. He also maintains that though the use of bronze originally preceded that of iron, yet that regard must be had to the circumstances of each country, so that it would not follow that a bronze celt found in Ireland was prior in age to the invention of iron. All that could be said was that it was older than the introduction of iron into Ireland, and when that was, no one could pretend to say. Mr. Pegge did not approve of the derivation of the name of celt from celtis or cœlare, but thought it derived from the name of the Celtic people who used the instruments. In his opinion the instruments were not Roman, especially as they were frequent in[34] Ireland and in places where the Romans never were settled. The specimen on which he comments is of the palstave form, and, though it might be mounted as a tool, he thinks it could never have served as an axe, but it might have tipped a dart or javelin.

Douglas[125] was of opinion that the bronze arms found in this country were not Roman, but that it was more reasonable to refer them to the early inhabitants, of probably not less than two centuries b.c.

Mr. C. J. Harford, F.S.A.,[126] writing in 1801, expressed his opinion that a clue as to the uses of celts might be obtained from a consideration of similar instruments which had been brought from the South Sea Islands. “Our rude forefathers doubtless attached the celt by thongs to the handle, in the same manner as modern savages do; and, like them, formed a most useful implement or destructive weapon from these simple materials.” He thought that the metal celts might have been fabricated abroad and exported to this country, just as we have sent to the South Sea Islands an imitation in iron of the stone hatchet there in use.

Coming down to later times, we find Sir Richard Colt Hoare,[127] who discovered a few flat and flanged celts in the Wiltshire barrows, regarding them as for domestic, and not for military, architectural, or religious purposes. He thought that the flat form must be the most ancient, from which the pattern of that with the socket for the insertion of a handle was taken; for among the numerous specimens described by Mr. Lort in the Archæologia, not one of the latter pattern is mentioned as having been discovered in a barrow. As many were found in Gaul, he rather supposed that they were imported from the Continent; or, perhaps, the art of making them might have been introduced from Gaul. From the method of hafting of one of those he found (see Fig. 189), he seems to have regarded the whole of them as chisels rather than hatchets.

Sir Joseph Banks,[128] in some observations communicated to the Society of Antiquaries in 1818, on an ancient celt found near Boston, Lincolnshire, pointed out the manner in which looped palstaves could be hafted so as to serve either as axes, adzes, or chisels. He thought that they were ill adapted for any warlike purposes, and regarded them as tools such as might be used in hollowing out the trunks of trees to form canoes, and suggested that they were secured to their handles by strings tied round them in the[35] same manner as the stone axes used in the South Sea Islands were fastened to theirs.

About the year 1816 the Rev. John Dow,[129] in some remarks on the ancient weapon denominated the celt, advocated the opinion that it was an axe, and probably a weapon of war. He also traces its connection with the stone celt, from which he considered it to have been developed.

About the same year the Rev. John Hodgson, secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-on-Tyne, communicated to that society a valuable memoir in the shape of “An Enquiry into the Æra when Brass was used in purposes to which Iron is now applied,”[130] of which mention has already been made in the Introductory Chapter. He thought that celts were tools which were well adapted for use as wedges for splitting wood, or that with wooden hafts they might be used as chisels for hollowing canoes and for similar purposes, some instruments found with them being undoubtedly gouges. As to their date, he thought that bronze began to give way to iron in Britain nearly as soon as it did in Greece, and that consequently the celts, &c., found in this island belonged to an era 500, or at least 400 years, b.c.

In 1839 Mr. Rickman[131] communicated to the Society of Antiquaries a paper on the Antiquity of Abury and Stonehenge, in the notes to which he propounds the theory that the socketed celts were used merely as chisels, with hafts of wood inserted in the socket. They could be then either held in the hand or by means of a withe, like a blacksmith’s chisel, while they were struck with a stone hammer.

Among writers of comparatively modern times, the first whom I have to mention is the late Mr. G. V. Du Noyer,[132] who in 1847 communicated to the Archæological Institute two papers on the classification of bronze celts, which are still of great value and interest. He traces the gradual development in form from the bronze celt shaped like a wedge to that which is socketed, and shows that an important element in the transition from one form to the other has been the method of hafting. He also enters into the subjects of the casting and ornamentation of celts; and as in subsequent pages I shall have to refer to these as well as to the methods of hafting, I content myself here with citing Mr. Du Noyer’s papers as being worthy of all credit.

[36]

In 1849 Mr. James Yates communicated a paper to the Archæological Institute of a far more speculative kind than those of Mr. Du Noyer, his object being to prove that among the various uses of bronze celts one of the most important was the application of them in destroying fortifications and entrenchments, in making roads and earthworks, and in similar military operations. He confines his inquiry, however, to those which were adapted to be fitted to straight wooden handles. Following in the steps of some of the older antiquaries, he appears to regard them as of Roman origin, and identifies them with the Roman dolabra, an instrument which he thinks was used as a chisel or a crowbar. In fact, he was persuaded that the celt was commonly used not as a hatchet, but as a spud or a crowbar. Had he but been acquainted with the ancient handles, such as have been discovered in the Austrian salt-mines and elsewhere, he would probably have come round to another opinion as to the ordinary method of hafting, though it is of course possible that in some instances these instruments may have been mounted and used as spuds. Had he practically tried mounting them and using them as crowbars, he would have found that with but slight strain the shafts would break or the celts become loosened upon them. And had he been better versed in archæology, he would have known that whatever was the form of the Roman dolabra, or whatever the uses for which it served, it can hardly have differed from their other implements in being made of bronze and not of iron; and he would have thought twice before engraving bronze celts from Cornwall and Furness as illustrations of the Roman dolabra in Smith’s “Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities.”

The ring or loop, which so often is found on the side of celts of the palstave and socketed forms, was thought by Mr. Yates to have been principally of use to assist in carrying them, a dozen or twenty perhaps being strung together, or a much smaller number tied to the soldier’s belt or girdle. He also thought that they might serve for the attachment of a thong or chain to draw the instrument out of a wall, should it become wedged among the stones in the process of destruction.

The next essay on celts and their classification which I must adduce was written by the late Rev. Thomas Hugo, F.S.A.,[133] who followed much the same system as Mr. Du Noyer, so far as the development of the socketed celt was concerned, though he differed[37] from him with regard to the method of hafting, as he was persuaded that, in general, celts were mounted with a straight shaft, like spuds. He considered that the loop was not used for securing the celt to its haft, but for hanging it up at home when not in use, or for suspending it from the soldier’s girdle whilst on the march.

Mr. Hugo’s paper was followed by some supplementary remarks from Mr. Syer Cuming, who suggests that a thong may have passed through the loop by which the weapon might be propelled, and contends that socketed celts are neither chisels nor axe-blades, but the ferrules of spear-shafts, which might be fixed in the ground, or even used at times as offensive weapons.

The name of the late Mr. Thomas Wright[134] has already been mentioned. In his various works and papers he claims a Roman origin for bronze celts and swords, though admitting that they may occasionally have been made in the countries in which they are found.

Among other modern writers who have touched upon the subject of celts, I may mention that accomplished antiquary, the late Mr. Albert Way, F.S.A., whose remarks in connection with an exhibition of bronze antiquities at a meeting of the Archæological Institute in 1861[135] are well worth reading. I may also refer to the late Sir W. R. Wilde, in his “Catalogue of the Copper and Bronze Antiquities in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy,” published in the same year; to Mr. Franks, in the “Horæ Ferales;” to Sir John Lubbock, in his “Prehistoric Times;” and to General A. Lane Fox (now Pitt-Rivers), in his excellent lecture on Primitive Warfare, section iii.[136]

Canon Greenwell, in his “British Barrows,”[137] has also devoted a few pages to the consideration of bronze celts and axe-heads, more especially in connection with interments in sepulchral mounds.

Foreign writers I need hardly cite, but I may mention a remarkable idea that has been promulgated by Professor Stefano de Rossi[138] as to celts having served as money, which has, however, been shown by Count Gozzadini to be unfounded.

In conclusion, I may also venture to refer to an address[139] which[38] I delivered to the Society of Antiquaries on the occasion of an exhibition of bronze antiquities in their apartments in January, 1873.

In treating of the different forms of celts on the present occasion, I shall divide them into the following classes:—

Flat celts.

Flanged celts.

Winged celts and palstaves, with and without loops.

Socketed celts.

What are known as tanged celts may perhaps be more properly included under the head of chisels, to which class of tools it is not unlikely that some of the narrow celts of the other forms should be referred.

It is difficult to draw a hard and fast line between the flat celts and the flanged, and between these latter and the so-called palstaves. I propose, therefore, to include the flanged celts, which are not provided with a stop-ridge to prevent their being driven into their haft, in the same chapter with the flat celts, and to treat of those which have a stop-ridge in the same chapter as the palstaves, with and without a loop. In a subsequent chapter I shall speak as to the manner in which these instruments were probably hafted.

---

CHAPTER III.

FLAT AND FLANGED CELTS.

Flat celts, or those of simple form with the faces somewhat convex, and approximating in shape to the polished stone celts of the Neolithic Period, have been regarded by several antiquaries as being probably the earliest bronze implements or weapons. Such a view has much to commend it, but, as already observed, it may be doubted whether in the earliest times, when metal was scarce, it would be so readily applied to purposes for which much of the precious material was required, as to the manufacture of weapons or tools of a lighter kind, such as daggers or knives.

Among celts, however, the simple form, and that most nearly approaching in character to the stone hatchet, was probably the earliest, though it may have been continued in use after the introduction of the side flanges, the stop-ridge, and even the socket. Some celts of the simplest form found in Ireland are of copper, and have been thought to belong to the period when the use of stone for cutting purposes was dying out and that of metal coming in; but the mere fact of their being of copper is by no means conclusive on this point.

A copper celt of the precise shape of an ordinary stone celt, 6 inches long and 2½ inches wide, which was found in an Etruscan tomb, and is preserved in the Museum at Berlin, appears to have been cast in a mould formed upon a stone implement of the same class. It has been figured and described by Sir William Wilde.[140] I have not seen the implement, nor am I aware of the exact circumstances of the finding. Celts may, however, like the flint arrow-heads inserted in Etruscan[141] necklaces of gold, have been regarded with superstitious reverence, and it does not appear to me quite certain that this specimen was ever in actual use as an[40] implement, and was not placed in the grave as a substitute for a stone hatchet or Ceraunius.

However this may be, some of the earliest bronze or, possibly, copper celts with which we are acquainted, those from the excavations of General di Cesnola in Cyprus, and of Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik, are of the simple flat form, and justify Sir W. Wilde[142] in his supposition that the first makers of these instruments, having once obtained a better material than stone, repeated the form with which they were best acquainted, though they economized the metal and lessened the bulk by flattening the sides. The annexed cut, Fig. 1, shows a celt from Cyprus in my own collection, which in form might be matched by celts of flint, though it must be acknowledged that the type in stone is rather that of Scandinavia than of Eastern Europe or the Levant. A slight ridge in the oxide upon it seems to mark the distance that the narrow end penetrated the handle. Numerous tools or weapons of the same form were found by Dr. Schliemann[143] in his excavations in search of Troy. They were at first thought to be of copper, but subsequently proved to have a small per-centage of tin in them. A number of flat celts, some short and broad, and others long and narrow, were found at Gungeria,[144] in the Mhow Talook, about forty miles north of Boorha, in Central India, many of which are now in the British Museum. On analysis Dr. Percy found them to be of pure copper. The same form was found at Tel Sifr, in Southern Babylonia. Some from that place, and from the island of Thermia,[145] in the Greek Archipelago, are also in the British Museum. Nearly similar instruments, said to be made of copper, have been found in Austria,[146] Denmark,[147] Sweden,[148] Hungary,[149][41] France,[150] and Italy.[151] I have one 3¾ inches long, from Royat, Puy de Dôme. A large and thicker specimen is in the Museum at Toulouse. They have usually a small per-centage, 0·15 to 2·08 of tin in them.[152]

I have already, in the Introductory Chapter, made some remarks on the probability of a copper age having, in some part of the world, preceded that of bronze, and need here only repeat that the occurrence of implements in copper, of the forms usually occurring in bronze, does not of necessity imply a want of acquaintance with the tin necessary to mix with copper to form bronze, but may only be significant of a temporary or local scarcity of the former metal. I may also add that without actual analysis, it is unsafe, from appearance only, to judge whether copper is pure, or whether it has not an appreciable per-centage of tin in it.

In treating of the different forms and characters of bronze celts, and of the places and circumstances of finding, I think it will be best first to take those from England and Wales, then those from Scotland, and lastly those from Ireland. I begin with those which have been found in barrows in England.

Many of the flat celts are ornamented in a more or less artistic[44] manner on the faces, or the sides, or on both; but before proceeding to notice any of them, it will be well to mention another variety of the plain celt, in which the faces, instead of being nearly flat or uniformly convex, slope towards either end from a transverse ridge near the middle of the blade. This ridge is never very strongly defined, as the total thickness of the blade from ridge to ridge is rarely more than half an inch. The plain variety is somewhat rare in Britain, but one ornamented on both faces will be described, under Fig. 5, and an Irish example is shown in Fig. 35.

A large doubly tapering celt (8 inches) was found at East Surby, Rushen,[176] Isle of Man. Some of those already mentioned partake of this character. In Hoare’s great work a specimen from the Bush Barrow, Normanton,[177] is engraved as being of this plain doubly tapering type; but from the more accurate engraving given by Dr. Thurnam[178] it appears that this instrument has flanges at the side, like Fig. 8, and must therefore be spoken of later on.

I now proceed to consider some of the flat celts ornamented with patterns probably produced by punches, as will subsequently be mentioned. The first which I adduce was found with an interment, and the ornamentation is so slight that it is a question whether the celt ought not to rank among those of the plain kind.

I now come to the flanged celts, or those which have projecting ledges along the greater part of each side of the faces, produced either by hammering the metal at the sides of the blades, or in the original casting. As has already been observed, some of the celts which have been described as belonging to the flat variety might, with almost equal propriety, have been classed as flanged celts, as the mere hammering of the sides with a view to render them smooth or to produce an ornament upon them “upsets” the metal, and produces a thickening along the margin which almost amounts to a flange.

[55]

The only instance known to me in which the rough castings destined to be wrought into this form of celt have been found in Britain is one recorded in the Archæologia Cambrensis[212] by the Rev. E. L. Barnwell. At the meeting of the Cambrian Archæological Association at Wrexham, Sir R. A. Cunliffe, Bart., exhibited what had evidently been the stock in trade of an ancient bronze-founder or merchant. It had been found at Rhosnesney, near Wrexham, and consisted of six palstaves, all from the same mould, another somewhat slighter and broken in two, the blade of a small dagger, three castings for flanged celts, and the shank of a fourth—all of them rough as they came from the mould. The cut given of one of the last-mentioned castings is here reproduced on a smaller scale as Fig. 18. It will be seen that a broad runner is left at the butt end, which was probably destined to be broken off; the sides would also be hammered, so as to increase the prominence of the flanges; and the whole would be planished by hammering and grinding. All the specimens have the appearance of having been washed over with tin, but this deposit of tin upon the surface may, I think, be due to some chemical action which has gone on since the bronze was buried in the ground, and may not have been intentionally produced.

A casting for a longer flanged celt found at Vienne (Isère) has been figured by Chantre.[213]

Turning now to the flat and flanged celts discovered in Scotland, I may remark that the instruments of the flat form appear to be comparatively more abundant in that country than in England and Wales.

Some of these blades, and notably the celts from Sluie, the Hill of Fortrie of Balnoon, and Ravelston, have been thought to be tinned. An interesting paper on the subject has been written by Dr. J. Alexander Smith and Dr. Stevenson Macadam.[225] Their conclusion is rather in favour of the celts having been intentionally tinned, so as to protect them from oxidation and the influence of the weather. I think, however, that the tinned appearance of the castings for celts from Rhosnesney affords a strong argument against this feature being the result of intentional tinning; for, if so, that metal would[57] have been applied to the blades after they had been wrought and ground into shape, and not to the rough castings, from the surface of which the tin would be certainly removed in the process of finishing the blades. A bronze hammer from France in my collection has all the appearance of having been intentionally tinned, even partly within the socket; but in this case the bronze appears unusually rich in tin, which was probably added in order to increase the hardness of the metal, and some considerable alteration of structure has taken place within the body of the metal, as the surface is fissured in all directions, something like “crackle china.”

A very large number of flat celts of the simplest form have been found in Ireland. So numerous are they that it would only encumber these pages were I to attempt to give a detailed account of all the varieties, and of all the localities at which they have been found. Sir William Wilde, in his most valuable “Catalogue of the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy,” has placed on record a large amount of information upon this subject, from which some of the facts hereafter mentioned are borrowed, and to which the reader is referred for farther information. Some of those of the rudest manufacture are formed “of red, almost unalloyed copper.”[238] These vary in length from about 2½ inches to 6½ inches, and are never ornamented.

The patterns punched upon the celts of this type show a great variety of form, and not a little fertility of design in the ancient artificers.[243] Various combinations of chevron patterns are the most frequent, though grained surfaces and straight lines like those on Fig. 17 also frequently occur. Sir William Wilde describes them as hammered, punched, engraved, or cast. Most of the patterns were, however, produced by means of punches, though it is possible that in some instances the other processes may have been used.

Figs. 39 to 43, borrowed from Wilde (Figs. 286 to 290), show some of the patterns full size. The punch most commonly employed must have resembled a narrow and blunt chisel; but a kind of centre-punch, producing a shallow round indentation, was also employed, and possibly a somewhat curved punch like a blunt gouge. In some cases the lines between the punched marks are, according to Wilde, engraved. It is, however, a question whether even the finest lines might not have been produced by a chisel used after the manner of a punch. What were probably punches for[68] producing such patterns have been found in some English hoards, as will subsequently be mentioned; and in the Fonderie de Larnaud, Jura,[244] was a punch with an engrailed end for producing a kind of “milled” mark, either in the mould or on the casting. Another, with concentric circles, seems best adapted for impressing the loam of the mould.

Some few of the Irish ornamented celts have well-defined stop-ridges like the English example, Fig. 51; but these will be more in their place in the following chapter. One or two other forms may, however, be here mentioned, though they approximate closely to the chisels described in subsequent pages.

In the next chapter are described the celts in which the side flanges have become more fully developed, so as to form wings to embrace and steady the handle, and the central ridge has grown into a well-marked shoulder against which the end of the haft could rest.

---

CHAPTER IV.

WINGED CELTS AND PALSTAVES.

To any one who has examined an extensive collection of the bronze instruments found in this country it will at once be apparent that in the class of celts designed to be fixed in some sort of haft, and not themselves socketed for the reception of a handle, there is a wide range of form. Any attempt, however, to divide them into well-marked classes is soon seen to be futile, as there is found to be a gradual transition from what at first sight appears to be a well-marked form into some other which presents different characteristics. If, for instance, we take the side flanges as a criterion, we find them ranging from a mere thickening on the margins of the flat celts to well-developed flanges, extending along nearly the whole blade; we then find them confined to the upper part of the instrument, and in some cases of great lateral extent, so as to be capable of being hammered over to form a kind of semicircular socket on each side of the blade. In other cases we find that the flanges have some part of their apparent projection due to a diminution in the thickness of the portion of the blade which lies between them. If we take as a criterion the stop-ridge, as it has been termed, a projecting ridge for the purpose of preventing the blade being driven too far into its wooden handle, we find the ridge in a rudimentary form in the blades which taper both ways; next as a slightly raised ridge or bead running across the blade; then as a better-defined ridge, to which, at last, greater development is given by a reduction in the thickness of the blade above it. The presence or absence of a loop at the side is, no doubt, a good differentiation, but as this is a mere minor accessory, and two celts may be identical in other respects with the exception of one being provided with a loop and the other being without it, it does not materially assist in the classification of this group of instruments, although for convenience’s sake it is best to[71] treat of the two varieties of form separately. An additional reason for this may be found in the possibility that the loop was a comparatively late invention, so that the palstaves provided with it may be in some cases of later date than those without it, though the identity in the ornamentation of some of the instruments of the two classes, and the fact of their being occasionally found together, are almost conclusive as to their contemporaneity.

In the present chapter I propose to treat of the celts with a stop-ridge, of the winged celts, and of those of the palstave form.

The winged celts may be generally described as those in which the flanges are short and have a great amount of lateral extension. When these wings are hammered over so as to form a kind of socket on each side of the blade, one of the varieties of the palstave form is the result. The other and more common variety of the palstave form has the portion of the blade which lies between the wings or side flanges and above the stop-ridge cast thinner than the rest of the blade, thus leaving a recess or groove on each side into which the handle fitted.

I have already made frequent use of the term palstave, and it will be well here to make a few remarks as to the origin and meaning of the word. The term palstave, or more properly paalstab, comes to us from the Scandinavian antiquaries. Their reason for adopting the term was that there is still in use in Iceland a kind of narrow spade or spud, which is known by the name of paalstab, and which somewhat resembles these bronze[72] instruments. Woodcuts of two of these Icelandic palstaves are given in the Archæological Journal,[247] from drawings communicated to Mr. Yates by Councillor Thomsen, of Copenhagen. They are here by permission reproduced. The derivation of the term suggested in a note to the Journal is that paal comes from the Icelandic verb pula, or pala, to labour, so that the word means the “labouring staff.” But this appears to me erroneous. Pul, indeed, signifies hard, laborious work; but pæli (at pæla) means to dig, and pall (conf. Latin pala and French pelle) means a kind of spade or shovel. The word, indeed, survives in the English language as peel, the name of a kind of wooden shovel used by bakers for placing loaves in the oven. The meaning of the term would appear, then, to be rather “spade staff” than “labouring staff,” unless the word labouring be used in the sense of the French labourer.

Mr. Thoms, in a note to his “Translation of Worsaae’s Primeval Antiquities of Denmark,”[248] says that the “term Paalstab was formerly applied in Scandinavia and Iceland to a weapon used for battering the shields of the enemy, as is shewn by passages in the Sagas. Although not strictly applicable to the (bronze) instruments in question, this designation is now so generally used by the antiquaries of Scandinavia and Germany, that it seems desirable, with the view of securing a fixed terminology, that it should be introduced into the archæology of England.” The term had already been used in 1848 in the “Guide to Northern Archæology,”[249] edited by the Earl of Ellesmere, and has now, like celt, become adopted into the English language.

I have not been able to refer to the passage in the Sagas mentioned as above by Mr. Thoms, but whatever may be the original meaning of the word palstave, it is applied by northern antiquaries to all the forms of celts with the exception of those of the socketed type.[250]

Among English antiquaries it has, I think, been used in a more restricted sense. Professor Daniel Wilson[251] defines palstaves as “wedges, more or less axe-shaped, having a groove on each side terminating in a stop-ridge, and with lateral flanges destined to secure a hold on the handle. The typical example, however, which he engraves has neither groove nor stop-ridge, but is what I should term a winged celt, like Fig. 56.

[73]

In the present work I propose confining the term palstave to the two varieties of form already mentioned; viz. the winged celts which have their wings hammered over so as to form what may be termed external sockets to the blade; and those with the portion of the blade which lies between the side flanges and above the stop thinner than that which is below.

The first form, however, of which I have to treat is that of the celts provided with a stop-ridge on each face. These are almost always flanged celts.

A Scotch example will be subsequently cited.

I have a palstave of nearly the same form, but with a more clearly defined semi-conical bracket below the stop, which was found at Masseyck, on the frontiers of Belgium and Holland.

The palstaves which are provided with a loop on one side present as many varieties as those without the loop. The same character of ornamentation occurs on the instruments of both classes. Indeed, for some length of time both forms appear to have been contemporaneous and in use together.

The form of palstave, so common in France and Germany, without stop-ridge, and with the side wings hammered over so as to form a kind of semi-cylindrical socket on either side of the blade, is rare in England. A specimen from the great find of Carlton Rode,[335] Norfolk, is shown in Fig. 85. There is usually at the top of the blade a sort of dovetailed notch, which may possibly have been made of service in hafting the tool. It originates, however, in there having been two runners by which the metal was conducted into the mould, which when broken off left two projections at the top of the blade. These being hammered so as to round the external angles and flatten the ends have come over towards each other, and made what was a notch with parallel sides into one which is dovetailed.

In this hoard were found numerous socketed celts, gouges, chisels, hammers, pieces of metal, &c. It seems to have been the stock in trade of a bronze-founder. Some other specimens from the same hoard will subsequently be described.

Iron palstaves with and without loops, some of them closely approximating to the form of Fig. 85, but others more like the ordinary Italian form of palstave, with a broad chisel-like blade, have been found in the cemetery of Hallstatt.[343] In a specimen in my own collection the side flanges are ornamented with transverse ribs, precisely like those on some of the bronze palstaves from the same locality. In one instance the upper part with the flanges is of bronze, and the lower part of the blade of iron or steel.

This form of instrument, with a section in the form of the letter H above, though easily cast, must have been extremely difficult to forge; and though we can readily trace its evolution in cast bronze, it so ill accorded with the necessary conditions for the profitable working of malleable iron that it seems soon to have disappeared when iron came into general use. The fact of the form occurring at all in iron shows that the iron instruments were made in imitation of those in bronze, and not the bronze in imitation of the iron. The same observation holds good with the iron socketed celts, spear-heads, and swords from the same cemetery.

The forms of celts and palstaves treated of in this chapter are found also in Scotland, though perhaps less frequently than those of the flat and flanged forms described in the previous chapter.

Many so closely resemble English specimens that it is needless to give representations of them, as a reference to the figures in the preceding pages will sufficiently indicate their character.

Turning now to the instruments of this class discovered in Ireland, I may observe that it is so difficult to draw the line between the flanged celts, tapering both ways from a central ridge, and those which have a slight projecting stop-ridge upon them, that some Irish instruments of the latter class have already been mentioned in the preceding chapter, to which the reader is referred for the more highly ornamented varieties. Other Irish types have also been incidentally cited.

Some of the Irish palstaves much resemble English and Scottish types, but generally speaking there are sufficient peculiarities in their forms to enable a practised observer to recognise their origin. For several other varieties of form, besides those mentioned in the following pages, the reader is referred to Wilde’s Catalogue.

Winged celts without a stop-ridge, like Fig. 53, have occasionally been found in Ireland, and one is figured by Wilde.[370] I have one (5¼ inches) from Armoy, Co. Antrim. The wide-spreading celt with a slight stop-ridge and segmental band upon the blade,[100] like Fig. 50, also occurs. A remarkably fine specimen from Westmeath with punctured ornaments on the wings and at the lower margin of the band has been engraved by Wilde.[371] Some are without the segmental band.

The type of Fig. 54 has also been found. I have a specimen (6 inches) from Ballinamallard, near Enniskillen.

We have not, for instance, the southern French form with a kind of contracted waist and broad side flanges or rounded wings in the middle of the blade; nor, again, the long narrow form almost resembling a marrow spoon; nor that with the almost circular blade, much like an ancient mirror. Nor have we the German form, with the V-shaped stop-ridge, nor that in which the stop-ridge forms a circular collar above a blade with beadings along the sides. Nor have we the common Italian form, with the blade like a long spud; nor, again, the narrow Scandinavian form, which is often highly decorated.

And yet, in comparing the instruments described in the present chapter with those of neighbouring countries, and especially of France, it will at once be remarked that, as might have been reasonably expected, the closest analogies are to be observed between some of those of England and France, while in the more peculiarly Scottish and Irish types the resemblances are more remote. It must, however, be borne in mind that there is good evidence in the shape of moulds and bronze-founders’ hoards, such as will subsequently be mentioned, to prove that these instruments were cast in various parts of this country; so that, though some palstaves may be of foreign origin, yet, as a rule, it was the fashion of the objects rather than the objects themselves for which the inhabitants of Britain were indebted to foreign intercourse. Even in the area now embraced by France there does not appear to have been any single centre of manufacture, but, taken as a group, the palstaves of the South, the North, and the North-west of France present some distinguishing characteristics. The same is the case with the socketed celts of that country, the English representatives of which will be discussed in the next chapter.

---

CHAPTER V.

SOCKETED CELTS.

The class of celts cast in such a manner as to have a socket for receiving the haft is numerously represented in the British Isles. In this form of instrument the haft was actually imbedded in the blade, whereas in the case of the flat and flanged celts, and of the so-called palstaves, the blade was imbedded in the handle, so that the terms, “the recipient” and “the received,” originally given to the two classes by Dr. Stukeley, are founded on a well-marked distinction, and are worthy of being rescued from oblivion.

That the recipient class is of later introduction than the received is evident from several considerations. In the first place, a flat blade not only approaches most nearly in form to the stone hatchets or celts which it was destined to supersede, but it also requires much less skill in casting than the blade provided with a socket. For casting the flat celts there was, indeed, no need of a mould formed of two pieces; a simple recess of the proper form cut in a stone, or formed in loam, being sufficient to give the shape to a flat blade of metal, which could be afterwards wrought into the finished form by hammering. And secondly, as will subsequently be seen, a gradual development can be traced from the flat celt, through those with flanges and wings, to the palstave form, with the wings hammered over so as to constitute two semicircular sockets, one on each side of the blade; while on certain of the socketed celts flanges precisely similar to those of the palstaves have been cast by way of ornament on the sides, and what was thus originally a necessity in construction has survived as a superfluous decoration. There is at least one instance known of the intermediate form between a palstave with pocket-like recesses on each side of a central plate and a celt with a single socket. In the museum at Trent[391] there is an instrument in which the socket[108] is divided throughout its entire length into two compartments with a plate between, and, as Professor Strobel says, resembling a palstave with the wings on each side united so as to form a socket on each side. The evolution of the one type from the other is thus doubly apparent, and it is not a little remarkable that though palstaves with the wings bent over are, as has already been stated, of rare occurrence in the British Islands, yet socketed celts, having on their faces the curved wings in a more or less rudimentary condition, are by no means unfrequently found. The inference which may be drawn from this circumstance is that the discovery of the method of casting socketed celts was not made in Britain but in some other country, where the palstaves with the converging wings were abundant and in general use, and that the first socketed celts employed in this country, or those which served as patterns for the native bronze-founders, were imported from abroad.

Although socketed celts, with distinct curved wings upon their faces, are probably the earliest of their class, yet it is impossible to say to how late a period the curved lines, which eventually became the representatives of the wings, may not have come down. This form of ornamentation was certainly in use at the same time as other forms, as we know from the hoards in which socketed celts of different patterns have been found together. As has already been recorded, the socketed form has also been frequently found associated with palstaves, especially with those of the looped variety.

The form of the tapering socket varies considerably, the section being in some instances round or oval, and in other cases presenting every variety of form between these and the square or rectangular. There is usually some form of moulding or beading round the mouth of the celt, below which the body before expanding to form the edge is usually round, oval, square, rectangular, or more or less regularly hexagonal or octagonal. The decorations generally consist of lines, pellets, and circles, cast in relief upon the faces, and much more rarely on the sides. Not unfrequently there is no attempt at decoration beyond the moulding at the top. The socketed celts are, almost without exception, devoid of ornaments produced by punches or hammer marks, such as are so common on the solid celts and palstaves. This may be due to their being more liable to injury from blows owing to the thinness of the metal and to their being hollow. They are nearly always provided with a loop at one side, though some few have been[109] cast without loops. These are usually of small size, and were probably used as chisels rather than as hatchets. A very few have a loop on each side.

The types are so various that it is hard to make any proper classification of them. I shall, therefore, take them to a certain extent at hazard, keeping those, however, together which most nearly approximate to each other. I begin with a specimen showing in a very complete manner the raised wings already mentioned.

A nearly similar celt found in Mecklenburg has been figured by Lisch.[399]

A larger celt of the same general character, found with a hoard of bronze objects in Reach Fen, Burwell Fen, Cambridge, is shown in Fig. 116. This may also be regarded as a characteristic specimen of the socketed celts usually found in England, though the second moulding is often absent, and there is a considerable range in size and in the proportion of the width to the length. No doubt much of this range is due to some instruments having been more shortened by use and wear than others. The edge of a bronze tool must have been constantly liable to become blunted, jagged, or bent, and when thus injured was doubtless, to some extent, restored to its original shape by being hammered out, and then re-ground and sharpened. The repetition of this process would, in the course of time, materially diminish the length of the blade, until eventually it would be worn out, or the solid part be broken away from the socketed portion.

Another variety, with a nearly square socket and long narrow blade is shown in Fig. 120, the original of which was found at Alfriston, Sussex. The loop is imperfect, owing to defective casting.[115] The socket is very deep, and extends to within an inch of the edge. Instruments of this type are principally, if not solely, found in our southern counties. The type is indeed Gaulish rather than British, and is very abundant in the north-western part of France. It appears probable that not only was the type originally introduced into this country from France, but that there was a regular export of such celts to Britain. For I have in my collection a celt of this type, 4½ inches long, that was found under the pebble beach at Portland, and in which the core over which it was cast still fills the socket, the clay having by the heat of the metal been converted into a brick-like terracotta. It could, therefore, never have been in use, as no haft could have been inserted. It is waterworn and corroded by the action of the sea, the loop having been almost eaten and worn away, so that it is impossible to say whether the surface and edge were left as they came from the mould. In the large hoard, however, of bronze celts of this type which was found at Moussaye, near Plénée-Jugon, in the Côtes du Nord, the bulk were left in this condition, and with the burnt clay cores still in the sockets.

I have another celt of the same size and form as that from the Portland beach, which was found near Wareham, Dorset, and appears to have been in use.

Another and common kind of ornament on the faces of socketed celts consists of vertical lines, or ribs, extending from the moulding round the mouth some distance down the faces of the blade. They vary in number, but are rarely less than three. In some instances the ribs are so slight as to be almost imperceptible, a circumstance which suggests the probability of celts in actual use having served as the models or patterns from which the moulds for casting others were made, as in each successive moulding and casting any prominences such as these ribs would be reduced or softened down. On any[118] other supposition it is difficult to conceive how an ornamentation so indistinct as almost to escape observation could have originated. There are some celts which on one face are quite smooth and plain, while on the other some traces of the ribs may just be detected. The same is the case with some of the celts which have the slightest possible traces of the “flanches,” such as seen on Fig. 111. The smearing of metal moulds with clay, to prevent the adhesion of the castings, would tend to obliterate such ornaments.

The vertical ribs or lines occasionally end in ring ornaments or circles with a central pellet, like the astronomical symbol for the sun ☉. Next to the cross this ornament is, perhaps, the simplest and most easily made, for a notched flint could be used as a pair of compasses to produce a circle with a well-marked centre on almost any material, however hard. We find these ring ornaments in relief on many of the coins of the Ancient Britons, and in intaglio on numerous articles formed of bone and metal, which belong to the Roman and Saxon periods. On Italian palstaves they are the commonest ornaments. But though so frequent on metallic antiquities of the latter part of the Bronze Age, it is remarkable that the ornament is of very rare occurrence on any of the pottery which is known to belong to that period.

The next class of socketed celts which has to be noticed consists of those in which the loop is absent. No doubt, in some cases, this absence arises either from defective casting, or from the loop having been accidentally broken off, and all traces of it removed; but in many instances it is evident that the tools were cast purposely without a loop. It seems probable that many of them were intended for use as chisels, and not like the looped kinds as axes or hatchets. The similarity between the looped and the loopless varieties is so great that I have thought it best to describe some of the instruments which may be regarded as undoubtedly chisels in this place rather than in the chapter devoted to chisels, in which, however, such of the socketed kinds as are narrow at the edge, and do not expand like the common forms of celt, will be found described.

Socketed celts have rarely if ever been found with interments in barrows in Britain. Sir R. Colt Hoare mentions “a little celt” as having been found with a small lance, and a long pin with a handle, all of bronze, near the head of a skeleton, in a barrow on Overton Hill,[486] near Abury, Wilts. The body had been buried in the contracted attitude, and had, as was thought, been enclosed within the trunk of a tree. It appears, however, from Dr. Thurnam’s account,[487] that this was a flat and not a socketed celt. It was a celt like Fig. 116, 3¼ inches long, which is reported to have been discovered by the late Rev. R. Kirwan in a barrow on Broad Down, Farway, Devonshire.[488] It is said to have lain in the midst of an abundant deposit of charcoal which was thought to be the remains of a funeral pyre. Mr. Kirwan informed Dr. Thurnam that there was every reason to believe that the celt was deposited where found at the time of the original interment. No bones, however, were actually with the celt, which lay 18 inches from the central cist.

A socketed celt with three vertical ribs, like Fig. 125, is also said to have been found with a human skeleton, and two uninscribed ancient British coins of silver, at Cann,[489] near Shaftesbury, in 1849. The celt and coins are now in the collection of Mr. Durden, of Blandford. In neither case are the circumstances of the discovery absolutely certain.

A curious instance of the survival of the bronze celt as an ornament or amulet is afforded by that which was found in a barrow at Arras, or Hessleskew,[490] near Market Weighton, Yorkshire. It is only an inch in length, and is shown full-size in Fig. 161. With it was a pin which connected it with a small light-blue glass bead. It accompanied the contracted body of a woman laid in a grave, and[135] having with it a necklace of glass beads, a large amber bead, and a brooch, bracelets, ring, tweezers, and pin, apparently of bronze, some of them ornamented with a kind of paste or enamel. The majority of the objects found in the group of barrows at Arras, of which this was one, seem to belong to what Mr. Franks has termed the “Late-Celtic” period, or approximately to the time of the Roman invasion of this country.

Socketed celts not more than ¾ of an inch in length have been found in Ireland, but with sockets large enough for serviceable handles, so that they might possibly have been used as chisels. The diminutive celts, about 2 inches in length, which have been found in large numbers in Brittany, and have been regarded by French antiquaries as votive offerings, might also by some possibility have served as tools; but this can hardly have been the case with the Arras specimen. A golden celt found in Cornwall is said to have been in the possession of the Earl of Falmouth,[491] but nothing is known of it by the present Viscount Falmouth, and the statement in the “Barrow Diggers” is probably erroneous.

It will be well to postpone the account of the different hoards of bronze objects, in which socketed celts have been found with other tools and weapons, until I come to treat of such ancient deposits, though some of them have already been mentioned.

Turning now to the socketed celts which have been discovered in Scotland, we find them to present a considerable variety of types, though hardly so great as that exhibited by those from England, and the recorded instances of their finding are comparatively few in number.

Socketed celts have been found in very large numbers in Ireland, upwards of two hundred being preserved in the Museum of the[138] Royal Irish Academy; and numerous specimens are to be seen in other collections, both public and private. Mr. R. Day, F.S.A., of Cork, has upwards of forty in his own cabinet. The Irish celts vary much in size, the largest being a little over 5 inches long, and the smallest less than an inch. The most common form is oval at the neck, and expands into a broad cutting edge. There is usually some kind of moulding round the mouth, giving the end of the instrument a trumpet-like appearance. The effect of the moulding is not unfrequently exaggerated by a hollow fluting round the neck, as in Fig. 167.

[139]

Fig. 169 shows a finely patinated celt, with a triple moulding below the expanding mouth, which was found near Belfast. With it are said to have been found a set of three gold clasps, or so-called fibulæ, with discs at each end of a slug-like half-ring (see Wilde, Figs. 594-598). Curiously enough, I have another set of three of these ornaments, also found together at Craighilly, near Ballymena, Co. Antrim. Mr. Robert Day, F.S.A., has a specimen which also is one of three found together in the Co. Down. It seems, therefore, probable that, like our modern shirt-studs, these ornaments were worn in sets of three.

In looking over these pages, it will have been observed, that though socketed celts occur in numbers throughout the British Isles, yet that those found in England for the most part differ in form from those found in Ireland, and that some few types appear to be peculiar to Scotland. Traces of continental influence are, as might have been expected, most evident in the forms found in the southern counties of England, and are barely, if at all, perceptible in those from Ireland and Scotland. Some few of the socketed celts from both England and Scotland are of the type Fig. 167—a type so common in Ireland as to be characteristic of it—and these appear for the most part, though by no means exclusively, to have been found in western counties. Although, therefore, the first socketed celts in Britain were doubtless of foreign origin, there was no regular importation of them for use over the whole country; but the fashion of making them spread through local foundries, and different varieties of pattern originated in various centres, and were adopted over larger or smaller areas as they happened to commend themselves to the taste of the bronze-using public. The use of socketed celts would, from their abundance, seem to have extended over a considerable period; and from their having apparently been found with objects belonging to the Late[144] Celtic Period they must have been among the last of the bronze tools or weapons to be superseded by those of iron. A socketed celt, somewhat like Fig. 116 but more trumpet-mouthed, is stated to have been found in company with a looped spear-head, two pins like Figs. 453 and 458, a bronze bridle-bit, and some portions of buckles of a late Celtic character on Hagbourne Hill, Berks. These objects are now in the British Museum, and there seems reason to believe the account of their discovery given in the Archæologia.[522] Some coins of gold and silver are said to have been found with them, but these are not forthcoming. Socketed celts have also been found associated with clasps like Figs. 504 and 505 at Dreuil, near Amiens, while at Abergele such clasps accompanied buckles almost, if not quite, late Celtic in character.

No doubt the final disuse of socketed celts was not contemporaneous throughout the whole of the country, and their employment probably survived in the north and west of Britain and in Ireland to a considerably later date than in the districts more accessible to Gaulish influences. The chronology of our Bronze Period will, however, have to be considered in a subsequent chapter. The transition from bronze to iron cannot so readily be traced in this country as on the Continent; but socketed celts, &c. formed of iron, and made in imitation of those in bronze, have occasionally been found in Britain. One (4 inches) with a side loop, and a part of its wooden handle, was found in Merionethshire, and is now in the British Museum. It has been figured in the Archæologia Cambrensis.[523] Another of the same type was found in North Wales.[524]

I have one (5¼ inches) with a rounded socket and no loop, found at Gray’s Thurrock, Essex.

I have another (4 inches) with a square socket, from Pfaffenburg in the Hartz; and others of longer proportions with round sockets from Hallstatt. The metal has been carefully welded together to form the sockets, in which there is no slit like those commonly to be seen in more modern socketed tools of iron. There are ornaments round the mouth of some of the Hallstatt[525] socketed celts, and both they and the iron palstaves are frequently provided with a side loop, in exact accordance with those on their analogues in bronze. Some of the socketed celts in iron from[145] the cemetery of Watsch,[526] in Carniola, are also provided with a loop.

As an illustration of the view that similar wants, with similar means at command with which to supply them, lead to the production of similar forms of tools and weapons in countries widely remote from each other, I may mention a socketed celt (10¾ inches) found in an ancient grave near Copiapo, Chili.[527] In general form it is almost identical with some of the Italian bronze celts, but it is of copper, and not bronze; and is not cast, but wrought with the hammer. The socket has, therefore, been formed in the same manner as those of the early iron celts from Hallstatt, with which it also closely corresponds in outline. The surface, however, has been ornamented by engraving; and among the patterns we find bands of chevrons, alternately plain and hatched, closely allied to the common ornament of the European Bronze Age. What is, perhaps, more striking still is that the Greek fret also occurs as an ornament on the faces.

The method in which socketed and other celts were hafted will be discussed in the next chapter.

---

CHAPTER VI.

METHODS OF HAFTING CELTS.

Any account of the various forms of celts and palstaves which have been discovered in this country, such as that attempted in the preceding chapters, would be incomplete without some observations as to the manner in which they were probably hafted or mounted for use, and some account of the discoveries which throw light upon that subject.

In a previous chapter I have cited numerous opinions of the older school of antiquaries as to the nature of these instruments or weapons, and the uses which they were intended to serve. Many of these opinions are so palpably absurd that it is needless again to refer to them. Others which regard the instruments as having been mounted in such a manner as to serve for axes or adzes, for chisels, or for spud-like tools or weapons, have an evident foundation in the necessities of the case. There can, in the first place, be no doubt that celts and palstaves were cutting tools or weapons. There can, in the second place, be but little doubt that they were not destined for direct use in the hand without the addition of any shaft or handle. In fact, with the palstave and socketed forms, it is evident that special provisions are made for a haft of some kind. In the third place, this haft, whether long or short, must either have been straight or crooked. If straight, a kind of chisel or spud must have resulted; if crooked or L-shaped, an axe, hatchet, or adze.

It is possible that the same form of bronze instruments may have been mounted both with straight and with L-shaped handles; but, as will subsequently be seen, the probability, judging from what few ancient handles have been discovered, is that the great majority were mounted with elbowed handles as axes. At the same time, from the form and small size of some celts, especially of some of those of the socketed variety, it is probable that they[147] were used as chisels. Indeed, judging from the analogy of some other forms, and from the discovery at Everley, mentioned at p. 163, this may be regarded as certain.

As the discoveries of the original hafts of bronze celts have principally been made upon the Continent, I shall, in treating of this part of my subject, be compelled to have recourse to foreign rather than British illustrations. It will also, in speaking of the method of hafting, be desirable to make an attempt to trace the successive stages of development of the socketed celts; and, in connection with this part of the subject also, foreign examples will become of service.

And first, in illustration of the use of bronze blades as axes, rather than as spuds, or chisels of any kind, I may mention an instrument not uncommon in Hungary, and occasionally occurring in other parts of Southern Europe, which is perforated and similar in general form to our modern axe-heads of iron and steel. In Scandinavia also other varieties of these perforated axe-heads have been found. The common axe-like type has also been discovered among Assyrian antiquities. Another and distinct form which has been found in Egypt mounted as an axe or hatchet, with a wooden handle, is a flat blade not unlike the ordinary flat celt, except that instead of tapering at the butt-end it expands so as to have two more or less projecting horns, by which it was bound against the haft in a shallow socket provided for it. Egyptian axes mounted in this manner may be seen in many museums, and have been frequently figured in works on Egyptian antiquities.[528] The blade of an axe of this kind, formerly in the collection of the Rev. Sparrow Simpson, D.D., F.S.A.,[529] and by him presented to the British Museum, bears an inscription in hieroglyphics upon it, with cartouches probably containing the name of a shepherd king of the sixteenth or seventeenth dynasty. In my own collection is another bronze blade of the same shape and size, and with the same inscription, except that the names in the cartouches are different. Unfortunately this part of the blade is corroded, but Dr. S. Birch thinks that the cartouches contain the name either of Ramses I. or of a subordinate Ramses of the eighteenth dynasty. The hieroglyphics are the same on both faces of the blade, but on one run from right to left, and on the other from left to right. A hatchet of the same form,[148] still bound to its haft, was found in the tomb of Queen Aah-Hotep,[530] of the eighteenth dynasty.

Some of the stone hatchets from Ecuador, in South America, are also provided with projecting ears, and were tied against their helves in the same manner.

The stone axe, said to be that of Montezuma II., preserved in the Ambras Museum at Vienna, and shown in Fig. 180, may also be of this kind. Copper or bronze blades of this crescent or cheese-cutter form, with two projecting lugs at the top of the narrow part of the blade, have been found in Peru.

Broad blades of bronze, in form more like the ordinary flat celts, but with the projections at the top, have been found in the same country. I have one about 5 inches long and 3 inches wide, with strong lugs at the top 2 inches long. It came from Eastern Peru.

Some blades of this form were hafted in a rather different manner, as will be seen by means of Fig. 181.

This represents an iron hatchet used by the Aymara Indians, of the province of La Paz, Bolivia, which was brought from that country and presented to me by my friend, the late Mr. David Forbes, F.R.S. In this form the handle is split, and the blade is secured by a leather thong, two turns of which pass under the two lugs of the blade, and thus prevent it from coming forward; two[149] other turns pass over the butt-end, and thus prevent it from being driven backwards by any blow; while all the coils of the thong hold the cleft stick firmly against the two faces of the blade. Although no celts with the T-shaped butt-end have been found in Britain, or, indeed, in Western Europe, I have thought it worth while to engrave this curious example of the method of mounting such blades, especially as the central projections of the Irish form of celt, like Fig. 45, may have been secured by thongs in a somewhat analogous manner.

Turning now to the other British forms of celts, of which, as already observed, the flat and doubly tapering blades, like Fig. 2, seem to be the most ancient, it is probable that these were hafted by the butt-end being merely driven into a club or handle of wood, in the same manner as many stone celts appear to have been mounted. The modern iron hatchet, from Western Africa, shown in Fig. 182, will give a good idea of the manner in which the bronze celts that are so much like it in form were probably hafted. Another modern African axe has been engraved by Sir John Lubbock.[531] It is, of course, possible that some of the ancient flat celts were mounted after the manner of spuds, as is, by several German and Danish antiquaries, held to have been the case with those of the palstave form. It must, however, be borne in mind[150] that as a rule the stone celts, which the earliest of those in bronze must in all probability have supplanted, were mounted after the manner of hatchets. Moreover, the few stone celts, the axis of the straight handle of which was in the same direction as the blade, appear to have been hafted with short handles as chisels, and not with long shafts as spuds. Among those found still attached to their hafts in the Swiss lake dwellings, some few were mounted in short stag’s-horn handles as chisels, but the majority were fitted for use as hatchets, with a club-like handle, in which a short stag’s-horn socket was mortised as affording a receptacle for the stone, harder and less liable to split than those of wood. In some cases, however, the handles were made from a bough of a tree with a short projecting branch, which was cleft to receive the stone. One of these, from Robenhausen, is shown in Fig. 183, which is copied from Dr. Keller’s work.[532]

In Britain the traces of the original handles of bronze celts have been not unfrequently found, though the actual wood had perished.

In a barrow in the parish of Butterwick,[533] Canon Greenwell, F.R.S., found what he describes as “an axe-blade of bronze,” engraved as Fig. 2, which lay with a skeleton, and “the handle, which had been under two feet in length, could be plainly traced by means of a dark line of decayed wood extending from the hips towards the heels; moreover, from the presence of decayed wood on the sides of the blade, it would seem as if the axe had been protected by a wooden sheath. To all appearance the weapon had been worn slung from the waist.” In this case the blade had been fixed, apparently after the manner of Fig. 182, into a solid handle to the depth of two inches, as is evident from the surface of the metal being oxidized on that part of the blade differently from what it is elsewhere.

[151]

In a barrow at Shuttlestone,[534] near Parwich, Derbyshire, Mr. Bateman found about the middle of the left thigh of a skeleton a bronze celt, of “the plainest axe-shaped type. The cutting edge was turned upwards towards the upper part of the person, and the instrument itself has been inserted vertically into a wooden handle by being driven in for about two inches at the narrow end—at least, the grain of the wood runs in the same direction as the longest dimension of the celt.” “A fact,” adds Mr. Bateman, “not unworthy of the notice of any inclined to explain the precise manner of mounting these curious implements.” It may be remarked, however, that no part of the handle itself, beyond this grain upon the bronze, was preserved, and that this direction of the grain of the wood would be quite consistent with the blade having been mounted in a side branch from the shaft, after the manner of the Swiss stone celt shown in Fig. 183.

It appears to me possible that in other cases where the marks of the grain of the wood, or even the traces of the wood itself, have been found upon celts, running along and not across the blade, the somewhat hasty conclusion has been drawn that they were attached to the end of straight shafts instead of into side branches; and that possibly this opinion, when once accepted, may have affected insensibly the reports of the position of the blade of the celts with regard to the bodies with which they were found, and to the traces of their shafts.

The opinion first enounced by J. A. Fabricius that the celt was the ancient German framea or spear mentioned by Tacitus, seems also insensibly to have affected observers.

There is an account given by Thorlacius[535] of the discovery in a tumulus near Store-Hedinge, in Denmark, of a palstave with the wooden shaft an ell and a quarter long, into which the blade was inserted; the wood, as might have been expected, running down between the side wings; at the other end of the shaft there was a leather strap wound round for about a quarter of an ell. The whole was so decayed that not the least part of it could be taken out of the ground. Although nothing appears to be said with regard to the position of the palstave with respect to the shaft, this has been cited by Lisch[536] and others in evidence of this form of instrument having been mounted spud-fashion, as a kind of chisel-ended[152] spear. A more conclusive instance is that adduced by Westendorp,[537] who has figured a socketed celt without a loop, found in a fen in the province of Groningen, Holland, mounted in this manner on a straight shaft. I have, however, already remarked that some of the socketed celts of this character were probably used as chisels.

Whatever reliance may be placed upon the older discoveries, all those of more recent times are in favour of the instruments of the palstave form having been mounted as axes, hatchets, or adzes. In the museum at Salzburg, Austria, there are at least four crooked handles for this kind of blade, found in the salt-mines of Hallein, one of which is shown in the annexed cut. I am not, however, sure whether the blade was actually found with the haft in which it is now placed, nor, if so, whether it was originally in its present position with the loop outwards. It looks much more like an Italian than a German specimen, which has been added to the haft in recent times, and it has not the appearance of having been exposed for centuries to the action of salt. It seems more probable that the salt, which has fortunately had the power of preserving the wood, would in course of years have dissolved the whole of the metal, assuming that at the time when the haft was lost, or left in the mine, a blade was still attached to it, than that it should have left the metal, as here, almost uninjured. In this instance, moreover, the haft is perfect, and not, as in some of the other cases, broken, so as to raise an inference of their having been thrown away.[153] The position of the blade with the loop outwards is also suspicious.

A broken example of the same kind of haft, also from the salt-mines of Hallein, has been figured by Klemm,[538] and is to be seen in the British Museum. There are others in the museum at Linz.

Handles of the same kind, intended for palstaves, have been found in the Italian lake dwellings. In some discovered in the “palafitta” of Castione,[539] the notch is in the transverse direction to the shaft, as if the blade had been mounted as an adze, and not as an axe. In others the notch is longitudinal, and not transverse. In one instance the side branch has no notch, but there is a shoulder on it, as if it had served for a socketed celt.

A looped palstave, mounted in a similar branched handle, has been found at the lake dwelling of Mœrigen,[540] on the Lac de Bienne. In this case also the loop is on the farther side of the shaft.

That the flanged and winged celts and palstaves were, as a rule, destined to be mounted in the manner of hatchets or adzes, and not as spuds or spear-heads, is to some extent witnessed by the development of their form; the progressive increase in the size of the wings and flanges, more especially about the middle of the blade, appearing to be intended as a precaution against lateral strains, such as the blade of an axe undergoes, rather than against a mere thrust, such as that to which the head of a spear or lance is subject. Of course the stop-ridge is a preservative against the blade being driven back into its handle, in whatever way it is mounted. But the flanges, at first slight, then expanding at the middle of the blade, then becoming projecting wings, and finally being bent over, so as to form side sockets on each side of the blade, seem rather the result of successive endeavours to steady the blade against a sideways strain.

This development can best be traced in the series of flat celts, flanged and winged celts, and palstaves, discovered in the South of France.

Even the long narrow palstaves, which have so much the appearance of chisels, seem to have been mounted on crooked shafts. There is a long German[541] form with a narrow butt above the stop-ridge, and with but slight side flanges, which are continued[154] down along the sides of the blade below the ridge, that seems much more like a chisel than a hatchet. The usual length of this form is about 6 inches, and the width at the edge about 1½ inches, that of the butt-end, including the side flanches, being about ¾ inch.

But that palstaves of this kind were mounted as hatchets will be evident from an inspection of Fig. 185, which represents a specimen in my own collection, found in the district of Raron, near Brigue, Valais, Switzerland. It is, as will be seen, in fact, a socketed celt, but with the socket at right angles to the axis of the blade. The reason why it should have been cast in this manner is probably to be found in the fact that boughs of trees with a smaller branch at right angles to them are not easily met with, though such boughs are best adapted for conversion into the helves of this kind of hatchet. Some ingenious bronze-founder of old times conceived the idea of producing a hatchet which did not require a crooked helve, but for hafting which any ordinary straight stick would serve; and we have here his new form of axe-head. In practice, however, it was probably found both to balance badly, and to be expensive in metal, and the design appears not to have spread, as up to the present time this specimen seems to be unique. The most remarkable features in it have still to be noticed. The pattern from which it was cast seems to have been a palstave already mounted on its haft, and we have here the smooth and rounded end of the bough, with the smaller side branch running off at right angles, reproduced in bronze. Even the band by which the blade was secured in the cleft part of the handle is reproduced as[155] a spiral moulding. The banding which extends to the mouth of the socket is also spiral, and probably represents a binding round the original wooden handle at the part where, from experience, it was found most liable to break. The straight haft of this hatchet was secured in its place by a bronze rivet passing through the socket from side to side, which is still in its place, though all trace of the wood has disappeared.

With this singular celt was found a small dagger, 6½ inches long, which had been secured to its hilt by four rivets, and a penannular bracelet decorated with ring ornaments. It is remarkable how well the discovery of this form of celt bears out the theoretical suggestions of Sir Joseph Banks,[542] Sir Samuel Meyrick,[543] Mr. Dunoyer,[544] and others, including Sir W. Wilde.[545] Indeed, Dr. Richard Richardson[546] many years ago advanced the same opinion as to the manner in which such celts were hafted.

With regard to the usual manner of mounting those of the socketed form there can be but little doubt, as in some few instances the original handles have been preserved with them.

One such, found in the bed of the river Boyne, near Edenderry, King’s County, has been figured by Wilde,[547] whose cut, by the kind permission of the Royal Irish Academy, is here reproduced as Fig. 186. The helve is only 13¾ inches long, but seems well adapted to the size of the blade. So far as I know this is the only instance of such a discovery within the United Kingdom.

In Fig. 187, however, is shown an Italian socketed celt of a common form, with the original handle still attached. This specimen is in my own collection, and was found about the year 1872 in the neighbourhood of Chiusi, Tuscany. With it were another, also retaining its handle, a large fibula of silver, a scarabæus, and many small square plates of bronze, each having a fylfot[156] cross upon it, probably the ornaments of a girdle. All these objects had been buried in an urn, which was covered by a slab of stone, and most of them are to be seen in the Etruscan Museum at Florence. With the exception of a fracture not far from the angle, the handle of my specimen is perfect. The preservation is due to its having been entirely coated with thin plates of bronze, the sides of which overlap, and have been secured round the handle by round-headed nails about ¾ inch apart.

This plating is turned over square at the end of the handle, where there is a little projecting bronze eye, through which a ring may have passed, so as to serve for its suspension. At the sides above the celt there are some larger round-headed nails, or possibly rivets; and the end of the branch which goes into the socket appears to be secured by a rivet, which passes through from face to face. At the end of the handle itself, above the celt, is a nearly circular flat bronze plate,[157] with a round-headed nail in the middle to attach it to the wood. The fracture exposes the wood inside the plates, which has been preserved by the salts, or oxide, of copper. It has been thought to be oak. On the blade of the celt are some flakes of oxide of iron, as if it had lain in contact with some articles made of that metal. Indeed, from the form, as well as from the objects found with it, the presumption is that this instrument belongs to quite the end of the Bronze Age of Italy, or to the transitional period between bronze and iron.

It may be well here to mention that celts of iron of the flat form, with projections at the sides like Fig. 45; of the palstave kind, with the semicircular side sockets; and of the socketed form, have been found in the cemetery at Hallstatt, in Austria, the researches in which of Herr Ramsauer have been described by Baron Von Sacken. These discoveries seem to show that all three varieties were still in use at the close of the Bronze Period. In the same cemetery celts of the two last-mentioned forms were found in bronze, and palstaves occurred with the wings formed of bronze and the blade of iron.

In 1866 I exhumed from this cemetery with my own hands, when in company with Sir John Lubbock, a socketed celt of iron, with a portion of the haft still in it. The celt is attached to a branch of the main handle, which projects at an angle of about 80°. This has been split off from the handle, only a small part of which remains attached; and it is this portion only of the wood which has been preserved by the infiltration of some salts of iron, while the rest, which was detached from contact with metal, has disappeared. The wood of which the handle was made appears to be fir. On an iron palstave from the same spot it seems to be oak. On two bronze palstaves from France in my own collection, one from Amiens and the other from the Seine, at Paris, the portions of wood which still remain attached to the blades appear also to be oak.

In the Hallstatt specimen the inclination of the blade seems to have been towards the hand, and the part of the handle beyond the branch which enters the socket presents some appearance of having been bound with an iron ferrule, probably with the view of preventing it from splitting. The projection is somewhat longer proportionally than that in Fig. 185, and the end appears to have been truncated, and not rounded.

[158]

There have been in this country a few instances of the discovery of bronze rings in company with palstaves and socketed celts, and these rings may possibly have served a similar purpose, though it must be confessed that such an use is purely conjectural. That shown in Fig. 188 was found in company with a bronze palstave without a loop, but much like Fig. 74, at Winwick,[548] near Warrington, Lancashire, and was kindly lent me by Dr. James Kendrick, who in 1858[549] suggested that it was a “sort of ferrule to put round the handle of the palstave to prevent the wood from splitting when the instrument was struck.” The ornament on the ring, somewhat like the “broad arrow” of modern times, is of much the same character as the shield-like pattern below the stop-ridge of some palstaves. In the British Museum is a stone mould from Northumberland for flat rings, 3 inches in diameter, and for flat celts; but such rings probably served some other purpose.

Another bronze ring, 1⅔ inches in diameter, was found with a socketed celt in the Thames,[550] opposite Somerset House, but here the actual association of the two is doubtful.

I have already expressed a doubt whether the celt from Tadcaster, Yorkshire, and now in the British Museum, had, when found, the bronze ring with a jet bead upon it passing through the loop. The ring itself is made not of one continuous piece of metal, but of stout wire, with the ends abutting against each other, and nothing would be easier for the workman who found the three objects than to pass the ring through the loop of the celt and the hole of the bead. I have myself received from Hungary two socketed celts, each having imperfect penannular bracelets passed through the loop in the same manner, though they certainly had no original connection with the celts. It is, however, but right to mention that in the British Museum is the upper part of a celt with an octagonal neck, found with other objects near Kensington, on the loop of which is a small ring, barely large enough to encircle the loop. Of what service this could have been it is difficult to imagine.

If the association of the larger rings and the celts must be given up, it is needless to cite the opinions which have been held[159] as to the use of the one in connection with the other. Some references are given in the note.[551]

The early Iron Age of Denmark is no doubt considerably later in date than that of Hallstatt, but in several of the discoveries of objects of that period in Denmark socketed celts of iron have been found still attached to their helves. In the Nydam find[552], described by Mr. Conrad Engelhardt, the majority of the axes were of the ordinary form, with eyes for the shafts; but there were some also of the form of the socketed celt, though without any loops. These were mounted as axes, and not as adzes, on crooked handles about 17 inches long. The helves of axes of the ordinary form were from 23 to 32 inches in length. In the Vimose find[553] there were several of these iron celts, one of which was thought to have been mounted on a crooked handle, but the others appear to have been mounted as chisels.

The palstaves with the edges transverse to the septum between the side flanges seem to have been mounted in precisely the same manner as those of the ordinary form, except that when attached to their handles they formed adzes, and not axes. It has been suggested[554] that the palstaves of the ordinary form may also have been mounted as adzes, and probably this was so in some exceptional cases. Mention has already been made of some Italian helves with transverse notches for the reception of the blade. Some of the flat celts may have also been mounted as adzes by binding them against the shorter end of an L-shaped handle, in the same manner as the Egyptians fixed their adze blades.

In some palstaves, but more especially in those of the South of Europe, there is at the butt-end of the blade a kind of dovetailed notch, which appears to have been formed by hammering over a part of the jets or runners of the original castings, which were left projecting a short distance instead of being broken off short at the blade. Whether the hammering over was for the purpose of rounding the angles or for that of forming this dovetailed notch is somewhat uncertain; it is, however, possible that one or more pins or rivets may have been driven through the handle, so as to catch the dovetails and retain the blade in its place. It is not often the case that this portion of the blade is so[160] long that it would have gone through the handle and have allowed of a pin beyond it, as suggested by Mr. Dunoyer[555] in the case of a long palstave, with a rivet-hole near the butt-end of the blade. A palstave, found in a tomb in the department of Loir et Cher,[556] by my friend the late Abbé Bourgeois, is provided with a rivet-hole near the top, counter-sunk on either side so as to guide a pin into the place intended for it; and it seems probable, as the Abbé suggests, that this was connected with the securing of the blade, which is destitute of a loop, to the helve. Of six thin flat bronze celts, 7 or 8 inches long, from the Island of Thermia,[557] or Cythnos, in the Greek Archipelago, which are now in the British Museum, three that are broad are provided with square or lozenge-shaped holes towards the upper end of the blade, and three that are narrower are without. A flanged celt from Italy,[558] 6 inches long, has a circular hole in the same position, which may have received a pin. Some contrivance for keeping blades of smooth bronze fast in their handles must have been necessary or desirable from the earliest times. With stone celts we often find that the butt-end destined to be let into the wooden or horn socket was purposely roughened. With bronze, however, such a process does not seem to have been adopted to any extent; and probably with blades of bronze, so much less tapering than those of stone, the difficulty of keeping them in place was surmounted by attaching them with some sort of resinous or pitchy cement. A safe remedy against slipping out was no doubt found in the addition of the ring or loop to the side, which there can be but little doubt served for a cord to pass through, so as to hold the blade back to the handle. In a socketed celt, 5½ inches long, found in the Seine, at Paris, and now in my own collection, not only is the wood preserved in the socket by saturation with some salt of copper, but within the upper part of the loop there are distinct traces of a cord which was apparently formed of vegetable fibre. The Irish palstave, Fig. 105, with the curved projection instead of the usual loop, seems to show that it was only against the upper part of the loop that the strain came. No doubt, however, there was more strength in the loop attached to the blade at both ends than in the mere neb or projection. Some Italian socketed celts have similar projecting nebs, one on either side. In the case of the palstaves and celts with two loops, it[161] seems probable that the handle must have been somewhat prolonged beyond the side branch, which received the palstave or went into the socket of the celt.

It has been stated that some of the Spanish palstaves[559] with two loops were, when first discovered, attached to a straight handle of wood. But this opinion may have been formed from the grain of the wood impressed on the upper part of the blade running along and not across it. In the first account[560] given of the discovery, these palstaves were regarded as having been used for picking out the strata of coal, and one of them is said to have been firmly attached to a wooden handle by means of thongs interlaced and held by notches in the wood. This handle was described as having been straight, so that the instrument was fitted to be used as a crowbar and not as a hatchet. But inasmuch as the groove for the handle is only 2¼ inches long and ½ inch wide, while the length of the blade projecting beyond the handle is nearly 5 inches, it is almost impossible for it to have served in this manner.

Axe-heads of bronze of the modern form with an eye through them to receive a straight helve have not been found in this country, though, as already observed, they are not uncommon in Hungary, Southern Germany, and Italy. That the form was already known in Greece in the Homeric Age is evident from the feat of skill in shooting an arrow through the shaft holes of a number of axe-heads, arranged in a row, recorded in the Odyssey.[561] I have in my collection a fine double-edged axe, or πέλεκυς, from Greece, 8½ inches in length, with a round shaft-hole ⅞ inch in diameter. I have also two from Salamis.

Looking at the widespread distribution of perforated stone implements, especially battle-axes, throughout Europe, it seems strange that so few bronze weapons of the same class should be found. Possibly, however, these stone weapons may have remained in use even until the latter part of the Bronze Period, as they certainly did through the earlier part of it. In this country it seems doubtful whether any of the perforated battle-axes of stone belong to a time when bronze was absolutely unknown, as bronze knife-daggers, like Fig. 279, have so often been found associated with them in interments. Hungary is the country in which the perforated bronze battle-axes seem to have arrived at[162] their fullest development, many of them being of graceful form and beautiful workmanship. The perforated copper implements of that country were probably used for agricultural purposes, and I see no reason for assigning them to so early a date as the commencement of the Bronze Period of Hungary. They may, indeed, belong to a much later period. It is hard to account for this absence of perforated axes of bronze in Britain, but various causes seem to have conduced to render their introduction difficult. When first bronze came into use it must have been extremely scarce and valuable; and to cast an axe-head in bronze, like one of the perforated axe-hammers of stone, would have required not only a considerably greater amount of the then precious metal than was required for a flat hatchet-head, but would also have involved a far higher skill in the art of casting. Moreover, the flat form of these simple blades rendered them well adapted for being readily drawn out to a sharp cutting edge, and when once they had come into general use they would not have been readily superseded by those of another form, hafted in a different method, even were that method more simple. If the bronze celts were mainly in use for peaceful industries, while the warlike battle-axes were made of stone, the progressive modifications in the shape of the former would be less likely to be affected by the characteristics of the latter. It must also be remembered that in France,[562] which then as now set the fashion to Britain, perforated axe-heads of stone were very seldom used, and those of bronze were in the north of the country unknown.

But, to return to the celts of the British Islands, there can, I think, be but little doubt that the loop is, as already described, connected with the method of mounting these instruments on their hafts; and is not intended for the attachment of a cord, by which they might be withdrawn and recovered after they had been thrown at the enemy. Like the American tomahawks, they may, no doubt, have occasionally been used as “missile hatchets,” the “missiles secures” of Sidonius;[563] but the days of young Sigimer, whose followers were provided with these weapons, are many centuries more recent than those to which the bronze celts must be referred.

In the same manner, any idea of the loops having merely served[163] for hanging these instruments at the girdle may be at once discarded. For such a purpose the projection which we find substituted for the loop would be useless, and the presence of two loops would be superfluous.

On the whole, we may conclude that the majority of these instruments were mounted for use, somewhat in the manner described, so as to serve as axes or adzes. A smaller proportion of them may, however, not improbably have been provided with short straight handles, to serve as chisels, especially the socketed celts of small size and without loops. This is the more probable as several socketed instruments closely resembling them in character cannot be regarded as other than chisels and gouges. No example, however, of a socketed celt provided with a handle of this kind has as yet been found. The little instrument of brass fixed into a handle made of stag’s horn, which was found in a cist in a barrow at Everley,[564] Wilts, by Sir R. Colt Hoare, has more the appearance of being a tanged chisel, such as will subsequently be described, than a flat celt. It is shown full size in Fig. 189, which I have copied from Sir R. C. Hoare’s plate. There were no bones or ashes found in the cist, but several pointed instruments, and what appears to be a kind of long, flat bead of bone, as well as two whetstones of freestone, and a hone of a blueish colour had been deposited with it.

Professor Worsaae[565] has published an engraving of a narrow Danish palstave, which was found in a hill in Jutland fastened to its handle by three rings of leather. This handle was straight, but unlike that from Store Hedinage, which was an ell and a quarter long, was not more than about 8 inches in length. In some other instances, he says, the blade has been fastened to the handle by nails or rivets.

I have already mentioned that some of the socketed celts of iron belonging to the early Iron Age of Denmark have been found[164] mounted as chisels. A good example of one thus hafted has been figured by Engelhardt.[566] The part of the handle which goes into the socket is tapered to fit it. Above this the handle expands with a shoulder projecting somewhat beyond the outside of the celt. It continues of this size for about 1½ inches, and is then again reduced to the same size as the mouth of the celt. The whole of the handle beyond the metal is about 4 inches in length.

Having said thus much with regard to the early iron chisels, it will, however, now be well to proceed to the consideration of those formed of bronze, and of the other bronze tools found in this country.

---

CHAPTER VII.

CHISELS, GOUGES, HAMMERS, AND OTHER TOOLS.

Although, doubtless, many if not most of the instruments of different forms, described in the preceding chapters, were used as tools, and not as weapons, yet in some cases, especially where they have been found in graves, it is more probable that they formed part of the equipment of a warrior than of an artificer. With regard to the various forms of which I intend to treat in the present chapter, there can hardly exist a doubt that they should be regarded as tools, and not as weapons. Already in the Neolithic Period we find many of these forms of tools, such as chisels and gouges, developed; and so far as hammers are concerned, it seems probable that for many purposes a stone held in the hand may have served during the Bronze Period as a hammer or mallet, just as it often does now in the age of steel and steam. I have elsewhere[567] mentioned a fact communicated to me by the late Mr. David Forbes, F.R.S., that in Peru and Bolivia the masons, skilful in working hard stone with steel chisels, make use of no other mallet or hammer than a stone pebble held in the hand.

The simplest form of chisel is of course a short bar of metal brought to an edge at one end and left blunt at the other where it receives the blows of the hammer or mallet. Such at the present day are the ordinary chisels of the stone-mason, and the “cold chisel” of the engineer.

Most of the Scandinavian chisels of flint are of nearly the same form as the simplest metal chisels, being square in section in the upper part and gradually tapering to an edge at the lower end. Bronze chisels of this form are, however, but rarely met with in any part of Europe. One such, however, was found at Plymstock,[568][166] near Oreston, Devonshire, in company with sixteen flanged celts like Figs. 9 and 10, three daggers, and a tanged spear-head, engraved as Fig. 327. It is shown in Fig. 190. Its length is 4 inches, and the cutting edge is rather more than ¼ inch in width. The late Mr. Albert Way, who describes this specimen in the Archæological Journal, regarded it as unique in England; and the form, so far as I am aware, has not again been found in this country. It is now in the British Museum.

As chisels were probably used in ancient times, as at present, not only in conjunction with a mallet, but also in the hand alone with pressure as paring-tools, it would have been found convenient to attach them to wooden or horn handles. Accordingly we find them both provided with a tang or shank for driving into a wooden handle, like the majority of modern chisels, and also, though more rarely, with a socket for the reception of a handle, like the heavy mortising chisels of the present day. Chisels of the tanged variety vary considerably in size and strength, and in the relative width of the blade to the length.

[170]

This form of instrument occurs but rarely in Scotland; but what appears to be a chisel of this kind is engraved by Wilson.[582] His figure is, however, a mere diagram, without any scale attached, and the instrument is described as an axe blade with a cross limb, or as a “spiked axe.” Whatever its character, the original of the figure is said to have been found with other bronze relics at Strachur, Argyleshire.

In Ireland they are much more common. There are thirteen specimens in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy, as catalogued by the late Sir William Wilde,[584] varying in length from 2½ to 6¼ inches. Some of these Irish chisels, which approximate to flat celts in character, have already been described in Chapter III.

Tanged chisels have been found, though not abundantly, in France. One from Beauvais is in the museum at St. Germain.

The socketed form of chisel is by no means common in this country; but some instruments, probably intended for use as chisels, have already been described among the socketed celts not provided with loops. These are all comparatively broad at the cutting edge; but there is another variety, with a narrow end, formed much like the modern engineer’s “crosscut chisel,” some specimens of which will be now described.

That shown in Fig. 200 is from the great find of Carlton Rode,[587] Norfolk (1844), from which several specimens, including a tanged chisel (Fig. 192) and a socketed celt without loop (Fig. 160), have already been described; and some other forms, such as gouges and hammers, have yet to be mentioned. The edge is only 3/16ths of an inch in width, and the tool seems well adapted for cutting mortises. The idea of a mortise and tenon must be of very early date, as a mere stake driven into the ground supplies it in a rudimentary form; and tools let into sockets, or having sockets to receive handles, afford instances of connections of the same kind. In our modern mortising chisels the cutting edge, instead of being in the middle of the blade, so as to have a V-shaped section, is usually at the side, and presents an outline like the upper part of a K, . I have not met with this bevelled edge among bronze chisels.

[172]

On the side of this Carlton Rode chisel may be seen the mark of the joint of the mould in which it was cast. The socket, as usual with these tools, is circular.

Gouges.

Closely allied to chisels are gouges, in which, the edge, instead of being straight, is curved or hollowed, so that it is adapted for working out rounded or oval holes. In some languages, indeed, the name by which these tools are known is that of “hollow chisels.” It is an early form of instrument, and a few specimens made of flint have been found in this country, though they are here extremely rare, while, on the contrary, they are very abundant in Denmark and the South of Sweden. In the Scandinavian countries, however, bronze gouges are never found; and though gouges of stone were not unknown in this country during its Stone Period, their successors in bronze do not appear to belong to the early part of the Bronze Period, but, on the contrary, seem to be characteristic of its later phases.

Of bronze gouges there are the same two varieties as of the ordinary chisel, viz. the tanged and the socketed, of which the former is far rarer than the latter. Indeed the only tanged gouge from Britain with which I am acquainted is that from the Carlton Rode[603] hoard, already so often mentioned, which is shown in Fig. 203. The original is in the Norwich Museum, the trustees of which kindly allowed me to engrave it. As will be seen, it is of remarkably narrow form, especially as contrasted with the socketed gouge from the same hoard shown in Fig. 207. There was a broken tanged gouge in the great hoard of bronze objects found at Bologna.

[174]

Socketed gouges have been found, though very rarely, in Scotland. That shown in Fig. 208, the cut of which has been kindly lent to me by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, was dredged up in the river Tay.[618] This appears to be almost the only Scottish specimen[176] at present known. Professor Daniel Wilson[619] terms it “one of the rarest of the implements of bronze hitherto found in Scotland;” but he adds that other specimens have been met with in the Tay.

In Ireland they are considerably more abundant, there being at least twenty specimens in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy, one of them as much as 4½ inches long.

Hammers and Anvils.

Another form of tool constructed with a socket to receive the handle in precisely the same manner as the socketed celts and gouges is the hammer. It is worthy of notice that, though perforated hammers formed of stone are comparatively abundant in this country, yet that instruments of the same kind in bronze are unknown. It is true that what looks like a perforated hammer, said to be of bronze, was found in Newport, Lincoln, and is engraved in the Archæological Journal,[629] but there is no evidence of its belonging to the same period as the ordinary tools formed of bronze; and the suggestion that it may have been the extremity of a bell-clapper is, I think, not far from the truth. It is very probable that many of the perforated stone hammers belong to the Bronze Period of this country, as do doubtless most of the perforated stone battle-axes or axe-hammers; for in the early part of the Bronze Period it is likely that metal was far too valuable to be used for heavy tools and weapons, and even towards the close of the period it seems as if it was only the lighter kind of hammers which were formed of bronze. The heaviest I possess weighs only five ounces, and the lightest less than half that weight. As will subsequently be seen, it is possible that some of these instruments were of the nature of anvils rather than of hammers, but for the present it will be most convenient to speak of them under the latter name.

The most common form of hammer is that which is shown in Fig. 210, from an original in the British Museum found at Thorndon,[630] Suffolk, in company with a spear-head, socketed gouge, socketed knife, and two socketed celts. The two hammer-like instruments engraved as Figs. 211 and 212 were found, with a number of socketed celts, moulds, &c.—in fact the whole stock-in-trade of an ancient bronze-founder—in the Isle of Harty, Sheppey, and are in my own collection. The larger of the two shows a considerable amount of wear at the end, which is somewhat “upset” by constant use. The smaller is more oxidized, so that the marks of use are less easily recognised. The metal of which[178] they are formed seems to contain a larger admixture of tin than is usual with the cutting tools; and I have noticed the same appearance in some other instances, so that even in early times the singular fact must have been known that by adding to copper the softer metal, tin, in a larger proportion than the one-tenth usually employed for bronze, a much harder metal resulted. At the present time the extremely hard alloy used for the specula of reflecting telescopes is formed by an admixture of about two parts of copper and one part of tin, the two soft metals mixed in these proportions forming an alloy almost as hard as hardened steel.

I am not aware of any examples having as yet been found in Scotland.

In Ireland they are rare, but four “round-faced socketed punches,” varying from 2 to 4 inches in length, are mentioned in Wilde’s Catalogue. These are probably hammers.

As to the manner in which these socketed hammers were mounted we have no direct evidence. It seems probable, however, that many of them had crooked hafts of the same character as those of the socketed celts. It is worth notice that on some of the coins of Cunobeline[646] there is a seated figure at work forging a hemispherical vase, and holding in his hand a hammer which in profile is just like a narrow axe, the head not projecting beyond the upper side of the handle. A seated figure on a hitherto unpublished silver coin of Dubnovellaunus, a British prince contemporary with Augustus, holds a similar hammer, or possibly a hatchet, in his hand. But though when in use as hammers they were mounted with crooked shafts, it is quite possible that some of these instruments may have been fitted on to the end of straight stakes and have served as anvils. The Rev. W. C. Lukis, F.S.A., informs me that at the present day the peasants of Brittany make use of iron-tipped stakes, which, when driven into the ground, form convenient anvils on which to hammer out the edges of their sickles, and which have the great advantage of being portable. Though such anvils are not, so far as I am aware, any longer used in this country, traces of their having been formerly employed appear to be preserved in our language, for a small anvil to cut and punch upon, and on which to hammer cold work, is still termed a “stake.”

It is worthy of remark that an implement of the same kind as these so-called socketed hammers, and made in the same manner, of a very hard greyish alloy, was found in the cemetery at Hallstatt,[647] and was regarded by the Baron von Sacken as a small anvil. A bronze file was found with it.

It is also to be observed that of the two hammer-like instruments found together in the Harty hoard one is much larger than the other, and may have formed the head of a stake or anvil, while the other served as a hammer. Still, as a rule, a flat stone must have served as the anvil in early times, as it does now among the native ironworkers of Africa, and did till quite recently, for many of the country blacksmiths and tinkers of Ireland.[648] Among Danish antiquities some carefully made anvils of stone occur, but[182] I am not certain as to the exact age to which they should be assigned.

Bronze anvils of the form now in use are of extremely rare occurrence in any country. That figured by Sir William Wilde[649] appears to me to be of more recent date than the Bronze Period, and I am not aware of any other specimen having been found in the British Isles; but as it is a form of tool which may eventually be discovered, it seems well to call attention to it by engraving a French example. This anvil is shown in two views, in Figs. 217 and 218. As will be seen, it is adapted for being used in two positions, according as one or the other pointed end is driven into the workman’s bench. In one position it presents at the end two plane-surfaces, the one broad and the other narrow, inclined to each other at an angle of about 120 degrees, so that their junction forms a ridge. This part of the anvil has seen much service, as there is a thick burr all round it, caused by the expansion of the metal under repeated blows. On the projecting beak there are three slight grooves gradually increasing in size, and apparently intended for swages in which to draw out pins. In the other position the anvil presents no smooth surface on which to hammer, but a succession of swages of different forms—some half-round, some V-shaped, and some W-shaped. There are also some oval recesses, as if for the heads of pins. The metal of which the anvil is made appears to contain more tin than the ordinary bronze, and therefore to be somewhat harder. On one face is the mark of the runner ⅞ inch in diameter, which was broken off after the tool was cast.

[183]

This interesting tool was found with the hammer already mentioned, a spear-head, a double-edged knife or razor, a knife with the end bent round so as to present a gouge-like edge, and a large curved cutting-tool of the same character (Fig. 247), all of bronze, at Fresné la Mère, near Falaise, Calvados. With them was a magnificent gold torque with recurved cylindrical ends, the twisted part being of cruciform section; and a plain penannular ring or bracelet, formed from what was a cylindrical rod. The whole find is now in my own collection. It is not by any means improbable that this anvil was rather the tool of a goldsmith of the Bronze Age than that of a mere bronze-worker.

Saws and Files.

While speaking of bronze tools, which up to the present time have not been noticed in Britain, but which may probably be some day discovered—if, indeed, they have not already been found—the saw must not be forgotten.

[184]

The file is another tool of exceedingly rare occurrence in bronze, though not absolutely unknown in deposits belonging to the close of the Bronze Period. Sir William Wilde[658] mentions “a bronze circular file, straight, like a modelling tool,” as being in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy, but I have not seen the original and am not confident as to its age. A file[659] was, however, found in the great hoard of the Fonderie de Larnaud, and another from the Lake-dwellings of the Lac du Bourget is in the museum at Chambéry.

The early form of file is indeed much the same as that of a very broad saw, the toothing being coarse and running at right angles across the blade. In the cemetery at Hallstatt,[660] in Upper Austria, files of this character were found, several in bronze and one in iron. The bronze files are from 5 to 10 inches long,[185] and some which are flat for the greater part of their length are drawn down, for about 2 inches at the end, into tapering round files. In the Bologna hoard were several fragments of files, including one of a “half-round” file.

Tongs and Punches.

From our greater acquaintance with the working of iron than with that of bronze, there seems to us a sort of natural connection between the anvil, hammer, and tongs. It must, however, be borne in mind that bronze is a metal which instead of being, like iron, tough and ductile, becomes “short” and fragile when heated, so that all the hammering to which the tools and weapons of bronze were subjected in order to planish their faces, or to draw out and harden their edges, was probably administered to them when cold. At least one pair of bronze tongs has, however, been found, which is shown in Fig. 219. This instrument was discovered, with numerous other antiquities, in the cave at Heathery Burn,[661] near Stanhope in Weardale, Durham, and is now in the collection of Canon Greenwell. As half of a mould for socketed celts and some waste runners of bronze were found, it is evident that the practice of casting bronze was carried on in the cave, and these tongs were probably part of the founder’s apparatus. Whether they were used merely as fire-tongs, or for the purpose of lifting the crucible or melting-pot, is a question. They appear, however, much too light to be of service for the latter purpose.

In the museum of the Louvre at Paris are some Egyptian tongs of bronze, which are remarkably similar to those from Durham. A workman seated before a small fireplace, holding a blowpipe to his mouth with one hand and with a pair of tongs in the other, is shown in a painting at Thebes, published by Sir Gardner Wilkinson.[662]

What I have ventured to regard as another of the tools of the[186] bronze-founder is a kind of pointed punch or pricker, of which an example is given in Fig. 220. This, as well as another which had lost its point, was found, with socketed celts, gouges, moulds, &c., forming the whole stock-in-trade of a bronze-founder, in the Isle of Harty, Kent. It seems to have been furnished with a wooden handle, into which the tang was driven as far as the projecting stop; and its purpose appears to have been the extraction of the cores of burnt clay from out of the sockets of the celts.

That these sockets were formed over a core of clay inserted into the mould is proved by numerous celts having been found with the cores still in them. The heat of the melted metal was sufficient to convert the clay into terracotta or brick, and in this condition the cores have been preserved. Some force was necessary to extract such hardened cores, and this could be well effected by driving in such a pointed instrument as that here figured. If the two prickers from the Harty hoard were originally of the same length, the broken one has lost a portion from its end exactly corresponding in length with the depth of the socket of the largest[187] celts found with it; as if it had been driven home through the burnt clay quite to the bottom of the socket, and then had been broken off short at the mouth of the celt in the vain endeavour to extract it.

Some small punches, without any tang for insertion in a handle, were found with socketed celts and numerous other objects in the hoard from Reach Fen, already mentioned. One of these is shown in Fig. 221. No moulds were discovered in this case; and though the hoard has all the appearance of being the stock of an ancient bronze-founder, it is possible that these shorter punches may here have been used for some other purpose than that of extracting cores. The end of one is sharp, that of the other presents a small oblong face. It is possible that, like the instruments next to be described, these may have been punches used in the decoration of other articles of bronze. Mr. H. Prigg,[663] in his description of this hoard, has suggested such an use. The large end of the punch shown in the figure bears no mark of having been hammered; it may, however, have been struck with a wooden mallet. Punches, more chisel-shaped at the point, appear to have been in use for producing the incuse ornaments which occur on so many of the flat and flanged celts. I am not aware of any tools which were undoubtedly used for this purpose having been observed in Britain; but, as I have already remarked, there were found at Ebnall,[664] Salop, two short-edged tools, which may possibly be punches, and if so may have been applied to this use. One of these is shown in Fig. 222, the block for which has been kindly lent me by the Council of the Society of Antiquaries. The other is described as of similar form but of rather longer proportions. They were found in company with spear-heads, celts, gouges, and broad dagger-blades; but it does not appear that any of these were ornamented with punch-marked patterns. The tools may, therefore, have been merely some kind of strong chisels, possibly used for breaking off the jets and superfluous metal from the castings. The thickness of the tool is rather greater than the cut would lead one to imagine, being ½ inch. These two tools have been regarded as hammers, or possibly weights. I have now spoken of them as punches, or possibly chisels, but it may be that after all it was the broad end that was destined for use, in which case they might be regarded as anvils.

[188]

Whatever the purpose of these particular tools, there can be but little doubt that punches were in use for the ornamentation of the flat faces and the sides of celts; and it will be well to be on the look out for such tools when hoards belonging to the ancient bronze-founders are examined. For the most part, however, these seem to belong to a period posterior to that of the ornamented flat celts, though decorated spear-heads occur in them.

Some of the punches from the Fonderie de Larnaud and from the Lake-dwellings may have served for decorating other articles in bronze.

Awls, Drills, or Prickers.

Allied to the pointed tools last described, but considerably smaller, are the awls, drills, borers, or prickers of bronze which have so frequently been found accompanying interments in barrows. No doubt such instruments must have been in very extensive and general use; but it is only under favourable conditions that such small pieces of metal would be preserved, and when preserved it is only under conditions equally favourable that they would attract the attention of an ordinary labourer. It is, therefore, mainly to the barrow-digger that we are indebted for our knowledge of these little instruments. Many belong to a very early part of the Bronze Age, but the form continued in use through the whole period.

A somewhat detailed essay upon them has already appeared in the Archæologia[665] in the late Dr. Thurnam’s admirable and exhaustive paper on “Ancient British Barrows,” from which I am tempted largely to borrow. I am also, through the kindness of the Council of the Society of Antiquaries, enabled to make use of some of the woodcuts which illustrate Dr. Thurnam’s paper. He distinguishes three types of these instruments, which, as he points out, correspond to some extent with as many types or varieties of the bronze celt. They are as follows:—

I. That with a simply flattened end or tang for insertion into its handle.

II. That with a well-marked shoulder, where the stem and tang unite; the object being to prevent its passing too far into the handle.

III. That with a regular stop-ridge, or waist, almost as marked as that in a carpenter’s awl, as distinguished from that of a shoemaker.

[189]

Whether the twisted pins from the Wiltshire barrows are of the nature of gimlets, as suggested by Dr. Thurnam, is a difficult question. I shall, however, prefer to treat of them as personal ornaments rather than as tools. It is possible that they may to some extent have combined the two functions. As to the instruments which I have been describing being piercing tools or awls, there seems to be little doubt; and Mr. Bateman can hardly have been far wrong in regarding them as intended to pierce skins or leather. Though not curved like the cobbler’s awl of the present day, they are probably early members of the same family. In Scandinavia these instruments are of frequent occurrence, sometimes being provided with ornamental handles also made of bronze.[688] They are in that part of Europe often found in company with tweezers and small knives of bronze, and all were probably used together in sewing, the hole being bored by the awl and the thread drawn through by the tweezers and, when necessary, cut with the knife. Possibly the use of bristles as substitutes for needles dates back to very early times.

In one instance at least tweezers have been found in Britain in company with objects apparently belonging to the Bronze Age, though no doubt to a very late part of it. Those represented in[192] Fig. 229 were discovered near Llangwyllog,[689] Anglesea, together with a two-edged razor, a bracelet, buttons, rings, &c., which are now in the British Museum.

A more highly ornamented pair of tweezers, with a broad end, found with a bone comb, a quern, spindle-whorls, &c., in a Picts’ house near Kettleburn,[690] Caithness, belongs to a considerably later period.

The needles of bronze found in the British Isles do not as a rule appear to belong to the Bronze Period, though some of those found on the Continent seem to date back to that age. Two are engraved by Wilde,[691] and there are altogether eighteen such articles in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy. A broken specimen (1¼ inch) from the sand-hills near Glenluce,[692] Wigtonshire, has been figured.

Another useful article anciently formed of bronze—though perhaps not, strictly speaking, a tool—may as well be mentioned in this place; I mean the fish-hook, of which, however, I am able to cite but one example as having been found in the British Isles. This was found in Ireland, and is shown in Fig. 230,[693] kindly lent by the Royal Irish Academy.

Fish-hooks of bronze have been found in considerable abundance on the site of several of the Swiss Lake-dwellings; and it is not a little remarkable that in form many of them are almost identical with the steel fish-hooks of the present day. The barb, to prevent the fish from struggling off the hook, is in most instances present, and double hooks are occasionally found. The attachment to the line was, even in the single hooks, frequently made by a loop or eye, formed by flattening and turning back the upper part of the shank of the hook. Fish-hooks were found in the Fonderie de Larnaud (Jura),[694] and in the hoard of St. Pierre-en-Châtre (Oise).

Such are the principal forms of tools and instruments of bronze found in these islands. Some of them, such as the socketed gouges,[193] hammers, and chisels, can only belong to the latter part of the Bronze Period, when the art of using cores in order to produce sockets or other hollow recesses in castings was well known. Others, like the simple awls so frequently found in company with instruments of flint in our barrows, appear to extend from the commencement of the Bronze Age to its close.

There still remains to be described a class of instruments in use by the husbandman, and not by the warrior; and as the present chapter has extended to such a length, it will be well to treat of these under a separate heading.

---

CHAPTER VIII.

SICKLES.

Sickles are the only undoubtedly agricultural implements in bronze with which we are acquainted in this country. Already in the Stone Period the cultivation of cereals for food appears to have been practised, and I have elsewhere[695] pointed out a form of flint instrument which may possibly have supplied the place of sickles or reaping hooks in those early times. The rarity of bronze sickles in this country, as compared with their abundance in some parts of Southern Europe, is, however, somewhat striking, and may, perhaps, point to a considerably less cultivation of grain crops in Britain than in countries with a warmer climate, while the inhabitants were otherwise in much the same stage of civilisation.

The traditions of the use of bronze sickles survived to a comparatively late period in Greece and Italy, and Medea is described by Sophocles[696] as cutting her magic herbs with such instruments (Χαλκέοισιν ἤμα δρεπάνοις τομάς), and by Ovid[697] as doing it “curvamine falcis ahenæ.” Elissa is by Virgil[698] represented as using a bronze sickle for similar purposes—

“Falcibus et messæ ad lunam quæruntur aënis
Pubentes herbæ nigri cum lacte veneni.”

When bronze sickles were used for reaping corn it seems to have been a common custom merely to cut the ears of corn from off the straw, after the manner of the Gaulish reaping machine described by Pliny,[699] and not to cut and carry away straw and ear together from the field. This practice will probably account for the small size of the sickles which have come down to us, unless we are to reverse the argument, and derive the custom of cutting off the[195] ears only from the diminutive size of the instruments employed for reaping.

Bronze sickles were hafted in different ways, sometimes being fastened to the handle by a pin, either attached to the stem of the blade or passing through a hole in it, combined with some system of binding; and sometimes being provided with a socket into which the haft was driven, and then secured by a transverse pin or rivet.

The sickles with a socket to receive the handle appear to be peculiar to Britain and the North of France. The other form occurs over the greater part of Europe, including Scandinavia, and the blades, as has been observed by Dr. Keller, are always adapted for use in the right hand. Dr. Gross, of Neuveville, on the Lake of Bienne, has been so fortunate as to discover at Mœrigen, the site of one of the ancient pile-villages on the lake, two or three handles for sickles of this kind. A figure showing three views of one of these handles has been published by the Royal Archæological Institute,[700] and is here by permission reproduced as Fig. 231. This handle is formed of yew, curiously carved so as to receive the thumb and fingers, and has a flat place at the end against which the blade was fastened. In this place there are two grooves to receive the slightly projecting ribs with which the stem of the sickle-blade is usually strengthened. Dr. Keller[701] has suggested that the blade of the sickle was made fast to the handle by means of a kind of ferrule which passed over it, and was secured in its place by two pins or nails.

The end of the handle forms a ridge, through which are two holes that would admit a small cord for the suspension of the sickle, and thus prevent its being lost either on land or water. We find this sailor-like habit prevailing among the Lake-dwellers in the case of their flint knives also, the handles of which were often perforated.

There is a remarkable resemblance in character between this handle and some of those in use among the Esquimaux[702] for their planes and knives, which are recessed in the same manner for the reception of the fingers and the thumb.

Some iron sickles, of nearly the same form as those in bronze with the flat stem, were present in the great Danish find of the Early Iron Age at Vimose,[703] described by Mr. C. Engelhardt. The[196] chord of the curved blades is from 6 to 7 inches in length, and one of the instruments still retained its original wooden handle. This is between 9 and 10 inches long, and is curved at the part intended to receive the hand. The end is conical, like the head of a screw, and is evidently thus made in order to give a secure hold to the reaper when drawing the sickle towards him. Sickles with nearly similar handles were in use in Smaaland,[704] in the South of Sweden, until recent days.

[197]

Of sickles without a socket but few have been found in Britain, and those mostly in our Western Counties. In a remarkable hoard found in a turbary at Edington Burtle,[705] near Glastonbury, Somersetshire, were four of these flat sickles. One of these had never been finished, but had been left rough as it came from the mould, into which the metal had been run through a channel near the point of the sickle. A projection still marks the place where the jet was broken off. As will be seen from Fig. 232, this blade is provided with two projecting pins for the purpose of attaching it to the handle. In this respect it differs from the sickles of the ordinary continental type, which, when of this character, have usually but a single knob.

Another of the Edington sickles with a single projection is shown in Fig. 233. This blade is more highly ornamented, and has a rib along the middle in addition to that along the back, no doubt for the purpose of increasing stiffness while diminishing weight. Of the other two sickles found at Edington, one is imperfect and the other much worn. Both are provided with the two projecting pins.

Two other sickles found on Sparkford Hill,[706] also in Somersetshire, present the same peculiarity. One of these much resembles[198] Fig. 233, though nearly straight along the back. The other is flat on both faces. Each has lost its point. A chisel-like tool was found with them.

With the Edington sickles were found a broad fluted penannular armlet and what may have been a finger-ring of the same pattern, a plain penannular armlet of square section, part of a light funicular torque like Fig. 467, part of a ribbon torque like Fig. 469, and four penannular rings, some of them apparently made from fragments of torques.

Two other sickles of the same character, each with two projecting pins, were found in Taunton[707] itself in association with twelve palstaves, a socketed celt, a hammer (Fig. 214), a fragment of a spear-head, a double-edged knife, a funicular torque (Fig. 468), a pin (Fig. 451), some fragments of other pins, and several penannular rings of various sizes.

All the objects found at Edington, Sparkford Hill, and Taunton are now in the museum in Taunton Castle.

A thinner form of flat sickle, if such it be, has been found in Kent. Among a number of bronze objects which were discovered at Marden,[708] near Staplehurst, there is a slightly curved blade with a rivet at one end, which appears to present a sickle-like character. I have not seen the original, and as it is described as a knife-blade it may prove to have been one, or possibly, what is of far rarer occurrence, a saw.

Of socketed sickles a few have at different times been dredged up from the Thames. One of these, found in 1859, is in my own collection, and is shown in Fig. 234. The blade, which is almost as sharp at the back as at the edge, is not quite central with the[199] socket, but so placed as to make the instrument better adapted for use in the right hand than in the left. The socket tapers considerably, and is closed at the end.

In Ireland these instruments are much more abundant. Eleven specimens are mentioned by Wilde[715] as being in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy, and there are three in the British Museum, as well as one in that at Edinburgh.

These three are the only instances I can cite of socketed sickles having been found outside the British Isles, so that this type of instrument appears to be peculiarly our own. The existence of a socket shows that the form does not belong to an early period in the Bronze Age, and the same is to be inferred from the character of the other bronze objects with which the Alderney sickle was found associated.

Inasmuch as the continental forms are as a rule different from the British, and as they are, moreover, well known, it will suffice to indicate some few of the works in which descriptions of them will be found. Some from Camenz, in Saxony, have been engraved in illustration of a paper by myself in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries.[720]

Others from Germany, some of which are said to have Roman numerals upon them, have been figured by Lindenschmit.[721]

Examples from Italy have been given by Strobel,[722] Gastaldi,[723] Lindenschmit,[724] and others.

They have been found in great abundance in some of the settlements on the lakes of Switzerland and Savoy. It has been thought that the Lake-dwellers did not cut off merely the ears of their corn,[725] but “that the straw was taken with it, otherwise there would not have been the seeds of so many weeds in the corn.” Diodorus Siculus, however, who wrote in the first century b.c., tells us distinctly that the Britons gathered in their harvest by cutting off the ears of corn and storing them in subterraneous repositories. From these they picked the oldest day by day for their food. Whether for threshing they made use of the tribulum,[726] that “sharp threshing instrument having teeth,” before Roman times, is doubtful; but that so primitive an instrument, armed with flakes of flint or other stone, should have remained in use in some Mediterranean countries until the present day, is a remarkable instance[203] of the power of survival of ancient customs. Such an instance of persistence in a primitive form much reduces the extreme improbability of the use of bronze sickles in Germany having lasted until a time when Roman numerals might appear upon them. If every St. Andrew’s cross and every straight line found upon ancient instruments is to be regarded as a Roman numeral, and the objects bearing them are to be referred to Roman times as their earliest possible date, the range of Roman antiquities will be much enlarged, and will be found to contain, among other objects, a large number of the bronze knives from the Swiss Lake-dwellings; for one of the most common ornaments on the backs of these knives consists of a repetition of the pattern XIIIIIXIIIIIXIIIII.

Even were it proved that in some part of Europe the use of bronze sickles survived to so late a date as supposed by Dr. Lindenschmit, their great scarcity in the British Isles affords a conclusive argument against their being assigned to the period of the Roman occupation, of which other remains have come down to us in such abundance.

---

CHAPTER IX.

KNIVES, RAZORS, ETC.

It is a question whether, if in this work strict regard had been paid to the development of different forms of cutting implements, the knife ought not to have occupied the first place, rather than the hatchet or celt; for when bronze was first employed for cutting purposes it was no doubt extremely scarce, and would therefore hardly have been available for any but the smaller kinds of tools and weapons.

Both hatchets and knives, or rather knife-daggers, have been found with interments in barrows; but it seems better to include the majority of the latter class of instruments, which appear to occupy an intermediate place between tools and weapons, in the next chapter, which treats of daggers; rather than in this, which will be devoted to what appear to be forms of tools and implements. Some of these, however, like the celt or hatchet, may have been equally available both for peaceful and warlike uses; and though I have to some extent tried to keep tools and weapons under different headings, it appears impossible completely to carry out any such system of arrangement. Nor in treating of what I have regarded as knives does it seem convenient first to describe what appear to be the simpler and older forms, inasmuch as there are other forms which in all respects except the shape of the blade so closely resemble some of the socketed sickles described in the last chapter, that they seem almost of necessity to follow immediately[205] in order. The first instrument which I shall cite has sometimes indeed been regarded as a sickle, though it is more properly speaking a curved knife.

It was found in Wicken Fen, and is now in the Museum of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, the Council of which has kindly permitted me to engrave it as Fig. 239. It has already been figured, but not quite accurately, in the Archæological Journal,[727] the rib at the back of the blade being omitted. I am not aware of any other example of this form of knife having been found in the United Kingdom, but a double-edged socketed knife with a curved blade, found in Ireland, is in the Bateman Collection.

The ordinary form of socketed knife has a straight double-edged blade, extending from an oval or oblong socket, pierced by one or two holes, through which rivets or pins could pass to secure the haft. These holes are usually at right angles to the axis of the blade, but sometimes in the same plane with it.

Commonly there is but a single hole through the socket, especially in the smaller specimens. That shown in Fig. 242 is of this kind, but presents the remarkable feature of having upon each face of the socket six small projecting bosses simulating rivet-heads. It was found in the Heathery Burn Cave,[733] Durham, with socketed celts, spear-heads, and numerous other articles. Another from the same cave (5⅛ inches) with a plain and rather larger socket is in the collection of Canon Greenwell, F.R.S.

[207]

In Scotland the socketed form of knife is very rare.

In Ireland the socketed form of knife is more abundant than in either England or Scotland. No less than thirty-three such knives[737] are recorded by Sir W. Wilde, as preserved in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy, of five of which he gives figures. Many specimens also exist in private collections.

In some instances the junction between the blade and the socket is made to resemble that between the hilt and blade of some of the bronze swords and daggers, such as Figs. 291 and 349.

There is another form of socketed knife which it will be well here to mention. The blade is sharp on both sides, but instead of being flat it is curved into a semicircle. For a typical example I am obliged to have recourse to a French specimen.

[209]

Another form of knife, which appears to be intermediate between those with sockets and those with merely a flat tang, is shown in Fig. 250. In this there are loops extending across the blade on either side, which would receive the ends of the two pieces of wood or horn destined to form the handle, so that a single rivet sufficed to bind them and the blade between them firmly together.

Another form of knife or dagger has merely a flat tang, in some[211] cases provided with rivets by which it could be fastened to a handle, in others without rivets, as if it had been simply driven into a handle.

The knife-blades with broad tangs, which were not riveted to their handles, were in some instances provided with a central ridge upon the tang, which served to steady them in their handles, and in others the stem or tang was left plain.

[212]

It will now be well to mention some of the other Irish specimens of this class.

Before proceeding to describe some other symmetrical double-edged blades, it will be well to notice such, few examples as have been found of single-edged blades, like the ordinary knives of the present day. Abundant as these are, not only in the Lake-dwellings of Switzerland, but in France and other continental countries, they are of extremely rare occurrence in the British Isles.

In Fig. 261 is shown a knife of a form which is of extremely rare occurrence in this country; though, as will be seen, it has frequently been found in France.

Some remarks as to the almost if not absolutely entire absence of bronze arrow-heads in this country will be found in a subsequent page.

The larger specimens of these tanged blades of somewhat triangular outline I have described as daggers, but I must confess that the distinction between knives and daggers is in such cases purely arbitrary. The more rounded forms which now follow seem rather of the nature of tools or toilet instruments than weapons.

[218]

These instruments are occasionally found in Scotland. Some of them are of rather larger size, and ornamented in a different manner upon the face.

The form most commonly known under the name of razor is that shown in Fig. 269, from a specimen in my own collection, found in the Thames, with a socketed knife and other objects, near Wallingford. One of almost identical character was found at Llangwyllog,[776] Anglesea.

In the next chapter I shall treat of those blades which appear to be weapons rather than tools.

---

CHAPTER X.

DAGGERS AND THEIR HILTS.—RAPIER-SHAPED BLADES.

Among all uncivilised, if not indeed among all civilised nations, arms of offence take a far higher rank than mere tools and implements; and on the first introduction of the use of metal into any country, there is great antecedent probability that the primary service to which it was applied was for the manufacture of weapons. So far as there are means of judging, a small knife or knife-dagger appears to have been among the earliest objects to which bronze was applied in Britain. Possibly, like the Highland dirk, the early form may have served for both peaceful and warlike purposes; but there are other and apparently later forms made for piercing rather than for cutting, and which are unmistakably weapons. The distinction which can be drawn between knives, such as some of those described in the last chapter, and the daggers to be described in this, is no doubt to a great extent arbitrary, and mainly dependent upon size. In the same way the distinction between a large dagger and a small sword, such as some of those to be described in the next chapter, is one for which no hard and fast rule can be laid down.

Nor in treating of daggers can any trustworthy chronological arrangement be adopted, though it is probable, as already observed, that the thin flat blades are earliest in date. The late Dr. Thurnam, in the paper already frequently cited, has pointed out that of bronze blades without sockets there are two distinct types. These are the tanged, which he regards as perhaps the more modern, and those provided with rivet-holes in the base of the blade, which seem to be the most ancient. I purpose mainly to follow this classification; and, inasmuch as the tanged blades are most closely connected with the smaller examples of the same character, described in the last chapter, I take them first in order, though possibly they are not the earliest in date.

[223]

The more ordinary form of instrument is that of which the blade was secured to the handle by two or more rivets at its broad base. These may be subdivided into knife-daggers with thin flat blades, and daggers which as a rule have a thick midrib and more or less ornamentation on the surface of the blade. The former variety is now generally accepted as being the more ancient of the two, and may probably have served as a cutting instrument for all purposes, and not have been intended for a weapon.

The mention of this pommel suggests that it is time to consider the manner in which these blades were hafted, as to which the discoveries of Sir Richard Colt Hoare in the Wiltshire barrows, and of Canon Greenwell in those of Yorkshire, leave no doubt. The hafts appear in nearly all cases to have consisted of ox-horn, bone, or wood, sometimes in a single piece with a notch for receiving the blade, and sometimes formed of a pair of similar pieces riveted together, one on each side of the blade. The lower end of the haft was often inserted in a hollow pommel usually of bone.

The nature of the arrangement of the haft when formed of two pieces will be readily understood on reference to Fig. 280, in which the presumed outline of the original ox-horn haft is shown by dotted lines, and the rivets by which the two plates of horn were bound together are in the position they originally occupied along the centre of the haft. The outline of the upper part of this handle, where it was secured by two rivets to the blade, is still visible, and is shown by darker shading. The pommel at the lower end was attached by pins of horn or of wood, and not by metal rivets. A separate view and section of the pommel is shown in Fig. 281. The original was found by Canon Greenwell, F.R.S., with a contracted interment in a barrow at Helperthorpe,[834] Yorkshire, at the opening of which I was present. As will be seen, the blade has all[228] the appearance of having been much worn by use and repeated whetting.

To return, however, to undoubted examples. The most remarkable of all dagger handles discovered in the British Isles are those obtained by Sir R. Colt Hoare from the barrows of Wiltshire.

In Ireland a few daggers have been found with bronze hilts still attached.

I must now return, from this digression as to the hafting of daggers, to the thin blades or knife-daggers of which I was speaking.

What appear to be knife-daggers, some of them with notches at the side for the reception of rivets, have been found with interments in Spain, and have been described by Don Gongora y Martinez[885] as lance-heads.

Knife-daggers of much the same character as the English have occasionally been found in Scotland.

[239]

In Ireland the thin flat blades are of rare occurrence. Canon Greenwell, F.R.S., has one from Co. Antrim (4¾ inches) with three rivet-holes, and with a V-shaped notch in the mark of the handle.

Dr. Thurnam[897] thinks it not improbable that one of the blades may have been a spear-head for use in the chase. In writing of these blades he observes, “Where two are found with the same interment they are not exactly of one type, but one is light and thin and of greater breadth, the other strengthened by a stout midrib relatively heavier and of more pointed or leaf-like form; the rivets also are larger. In such cases the former may, perhaps,[242] be supposed to be the dagger, the latter the spear.” Sir Richard Hoare in some cases discriminates between the spear and the dagger when two blades were found; and Mr. Cunnington observed in a barrow at Roundway,[898] Wilts, that a pointed blade only 3 inches long with three rivets had a wooden shaft about a foot in length, which, as Dr. Thurnam remarks, could not have been the haft of a dagger.

The fact that many of these blades bore traces of having had a sheath is in favour of their being daggers rather than spear-heads, though it must not be forgotten that Homer[899] describes Achilles as drawing the spear which had belonged to his father from its sheath—

Ἐκ δ̓ ἄρα σύριγγος πατρώϊον ἐσπάσατ̓ ἔγχος

Though Sir Richard Colt Hoare at first regarded all these blades as spear-heads, he observes, about two-thirds of the way through his first volume,[900] “daily experience convinces me that those implements we supposed to be spear-heads, may more properly be denominated daggers, or knives, worn by the side, or in a girdle, and not affixed to long shafts like the modern lance.” Further on, however, he mentions a “spear-head” from a barrow near Fovant,[901] having the greater part of the wooden handle adhering to it, so that the mode by which it was fastened was clearly seen. From the figure given in the Archæologia, and in an unpublished plate of Hoare, this seems, however, to have been a dagger rather than a spear.

Mr. Wakeman, of Enniskillen, in his interesting account of the discovery, describes the material of which the hilt is formed as bone, or rather whalebone. Both blade and haft are, however, now in my own collection, and I think there can be no doubt that the material of the hilt is in reality a dark-coloured ox-horn. On some Danish blades I have seen the fibrous texture of this substance still shown by the oxide or salt of the metal, forming as it were a cast of its surface, which has outlasted the horn against which it was originally formed. There are no traces of the rivets in the Galbally hilt, so that probably pins of hard wood served to secure it to the blade.

Some Scandinavian daggers have been found with their handles of horn still attached. One from a barrow in Hasslöf,[952] South Halland, Sweden, had its leather sheath with a long rectangular end of bronze still preserved. The length of the sheath is about twice that of the blade of the dagger.

[253]

The bronze hilts for the long rapier-like blades are rare, but not unknown.

It may possibly be the case that some of the other blades described in this chapter have served as the points of spear-like weapons, though, from the hilts being discovered with so many of them, there can be no doubt that the majority must be regarded as having been the blades of daggers or rapiers. Among modern weapons we have, however, some which, like the sword-bayonet, are intended to serve a double purpose; and though there can be little doubt as to the true character of the knife-daggers, it is hardly safe to assert that all the dagger-like blades were without exception mounted with short hilts as poniards, and that none were provided with straight shafts as pikes, or placed transversely on a handle to serve as halberds or battle-axes.

The weapons described in this chapter probably range over the whole of the Bronze Period of Britain. The knife-daggers, which have almost exclusively been found in barrows, often associated with other weapons formed of stone, may be regarded as among the earliest of our bronze antiquities; while the rapier-shaped blades, though of rare occurrence in hoards, appear to belong to a period when socketed celts were already in use. Of the dagger-like blades, in whatever manner they were mounted, a considerable number belong to an early period. The analogies of the different forms with those found upon the Continent have already from time to time been noted in the preceding pages.

---