THE EARLY HISTORY OF BARLICK (9)

[Stanley]

THE EARLY HISTORY OF BARLICK (9)

19 October 2001

It’s 100AD and Barlick has survived the first impact of the Claudian Invasion. If we could stand on the Weets then and look down into the valley the first thing that would surprise us would be how similar the landscape was to what we can see now. The hills all round would be bare of trees, true there wouldn’t be any walls on the moors but otherwise they would look just as they do now. The great deforestation of the Early Iron Age never healed itself because the soil structures and microclimates had been destroyed, a lesson we would do well to heed today.
In the valley, we would see trees and here and there a glimpse of field systems. Some boundaries would be marked by stone walls but most would be constructed of layers of turf and stones alternating. In the oldest parts of the settlement boundaries would be earth banks surmounted by hedges such as we still find around Hey Farm and alongside our oldest roads. The cultivated land was all in the valley bottom on the best soil. If we went down and looked more closely we would find that efforts had been made to improve the drainage of the valley bottoms by cutting drainage channels and even making field drains by digging a trench and laying brushwood in the bottom before covering it over, when I was farming in Warwickshire in the 1950s we were still digging these out of the clay soil and replacing them with land tile drains.
The animals in the fields would look strange to us. On the whole they would be smaller but we would readily recognise cattle, sheep, pigs and horses. The plots themselves would be small and there would be more arable than nowadays. Barlick wasn’t well-favoured for grain growing but they had to try because every settlement had to be nearly self-sufficient. Transporting bulky goods was possible by packhorse and perhaps small carts or sledges locally but extremely expensive.
The main settlement would almost certainly be where Townhead is today and would be made up of several solidly made houses, we can’t possibly know the number. They would be built of timber with wattle and daub walls and thatched roofs and clustered together for mutual support in times of stress. They would be reasonably comfortable by the standards of the day. Inside the buildings the humans shared the accommodation with the animals in that any needing shelter were under the same roof but I think they would have enough sense to pen them up.
There would be a central fire which was lit all the year round because it was needed for cooking. This would be a simple hearth in the middle of the beaten earth floor and the cooking pots would be made of earthenware, iron was still too expensive, any platters, dishes and spoons would be made of wood. Knives and forks weren’t essential as once meat had been butchered, it would be cooked in the lump until tender and simply torn off the joint. Then as now, the most important eating tools were the hands and a spoon. We can see a direct parallel in the way the slaves on American plantations managed their cooking in the absence of knives and forks. They cooked their meat until it dropped off the bone and shredded it with their fingers.
Our Barlickers didn’t have beds as we know them but we suspect they had wooden frameworks raised slightly off the ground to lie on. These would be made as comfortable as possible with straw bases covered with skins or very rough woollen cloth. These people were still hunters as well as farmers, there was no ownership of the hunting grounds to forbid them so their diet would be supplemented by venison, rabbits, hares and fish caught in the local becks.
The water supply was carried by hand from the nearest spring or stream, in this case the Calf Hall Beck. We have no idea about their toilet or waste disposal arrangements beyond the fact that they would be very primitive and on the same level as their animals. The concept of the midden into which all organic waste was piled ready for spreading on the land had been known for thousands of years and we have no reason to suppose they had made any improvements. When I first went farming in Warwickshire in the early 1950s the toilet arrangements were simply a board with a hole in it in a small outhouse. All the waste fell into a pit and drained off slowly into the main midden for animal waste by gravity.
By our standards they were still a primitive society but we mustn’t allow this to obscure the fact that in many ways they were very sophisticated and had a reasonable standard of living. In many ways they were more free than we are today, there was no central authority governing their lives. After the fall of the royal house of the Brigantes we suspect that the tribal structure was fragmented and whilst Stanwick or Isurium (Aldborough) was still the tribal headquarters there would be more power at the local level. There would still be an hierarchy of chiefs but we can only guess at what that meant for Barlick. What seems certain is that Barlickers would still owe allegiance to the Brigantes but under less control.
Remember that these people are still Celts. Their language would be incomprehensible to us, probably nearer to modern Welsh than anything else, they were still Pagans. Gildas, a monk writing in the 6th century, reckoned that Christianity reached Britannica in 37AD but this seems very early. Even if it was true, it is very doubtful whether it would have made any impact on Barlick as there is no record of any organised evangelism at this period. As we’ve noted before they would have had household deities and local sacred sites. We have no idea where these were but there are tantalising clues like the well on Whitemoor and the puzzle of the site of Gill Church. All we can be sure of is that they would have had a belief system of some sort and that the use of what we would see as magic would be part of their everyday lives.
What about the Romans at this time? What impact did they have on Barlick? Once the Brigantes had been subdued, our knowledge of the Romans and their methods suggests that as long as Barlick toed the line and didn’t cause any trouble it would be left alone. As far as Rome was concerned Lower Britannica had been conquered and they concentrated on the maintenance of law and order and gradual consolidation. One of the curious things about the Romans is that they didn’t try to impose their culture on the natives. Perhaps one of the reasons for this was that the legions themselves had such a varied culture because they were largely composed of mercenaries drawn from parts of the empire that had already been conquered. Tacitus tells us that many of the troops who fought at Mount Graupius in the high lands of Caledonia were Dutch and Belgian. They were all pagan and worshipped their own gods and there is good evidence that if they found a local god they liked they would worship that one as well, true religious freedom!
Another fact that we have to consider is that there were two distinct forms of administration in Britannica, The Civil and the Military rule. Roman Civil Rule never extended beyond the southern half of Britannica, the rest of the country was under Military Rule and this would include Barlick. What this meant was that beyond trade links, as long as an area remained peaceful it was left alone by the legions. The biggest impact the legions would have on the district was by passing through it.
The legionaries were the engineers and one of the first things they did was to establish transport routes and way stations around the country. (I often think that we would understand the legions best if we regarded them as a well armed body of civil engineers rather than an army in the modern sense.) By the end of the first century a small fort or refuge had been established at Elslack. It was 100 metres square and no trace has ever been found of any buildings so they either never existed or they were timber and have left no trace. This wasn’t a permanently manned establishment, more likely a safe refuge for a night camp, it was enlarged in the second century to almost twice the original size. The military road to the east went to Verbeia (Ilkley) and west to Bremetenacum Veteranorum (Ribchester). Recognise the name Verbeia? This was the name of the Celtic deity which we think was associated with the River Wharfe and the Romans used it for their fort. The Roman name for Ribchester is interesting as it seems to derive from ‘The Hilltop Settlement of the Veterans’. There is reason to suppose that retired soldiers from the local garrison were allowed to take up land there and settle as farmers. So we can assume that there was fairly regular traffic along the Roman Road to the north of Barlick, the present day Brogden and Greenberfield Lanes. If you look at the Ordnance Survey map you will see it marked as a direct route passing through Barlick, Chatburn and Clitheroe to Ribchester which was an important crossroads where a north-south route crossed the east-west road. The question we have to ask is how much did this affect Barlick?
There is no doubt that the Romans did interact with the Britons. There is evidence of intermarriage and retired legionaries settling in Britannia. The attractions were either favourable farming country or centres of wealth like Eboracum (York). The nearest evidence we have of this to Barlick is the veterans at Ribchester and possible settlement at Ilkley. I think we are fairly safe in assuming that Barlick wasn’t important or attractive enough for this to happen here. On balance I suspect that as usual Barlick was a backwater and was relatively untouched by Roman culture. The inhabitants just got on with surviving and making a bob or two wherever they could.
The Isles as a whole settled down into a pattern which was to last for another 300 years. Eire, the home of the Scots, remained free, the High Kings ruled at Tara, the druids officiated at their rites and cattle stealing continued unabated. Caledonia north of Hadrian’s new wall remained outside even Military Rule, populated by the Picts and Celts it traded with the south and occasionally raided it but was never subdued. The further west one went south of the wall in Lower Britannia the less Roman influence counted. In the south under Civil Rule a Romano-British culture seemed to be growing. Latin displaced Brythonic Gaelic as the language of the ruling class and trade went on apace. However, forces were building inside the Roman Empire which were to lead to the next big change, the withdrawal of the Legions. There was another change as well and we shall have to have a look at it next week. A new religion came into the country which was to change everything, Christianity.

19 October 2001