Page 124 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

carts, together with the boxes and baskets and coarse punch­
decorated pottery containing their gear and supplies. On the
march they drive the oxen, until they are old enough to accom­
pany the men and dogs who shepherd the flocks over the rough

pasture of the Pennine moors or follow the spoor of a spear-
wounded stag. But every summer they return to the ax factory in
Langdale, to put in a month or so making the axes to buy them
the wheat and barley that will keep them in bread and beer the
winter through.

There are always some older boys who feel the urge to
travel farther. Many take service for a season or two with the

traders who come with the corn sacks to fetch the axes, and with
them they will take the month-long journey to the south and
east. Their destination is the earth-banked villages and stock­

ades of the “foreign” agriculturalists on the south Downs, and by
these tiny timbered towns, often overlooking the waters of the
English Channel, they will pitch their tents, lay out their axes,

and spend their days in bargaining.
They will meet other traders of their own race, who speak
dialects akin to theirs. There will be other ax traders, with stocks

of granite axes from the factory in the mountains of north Wales,
and with them there will be interminable technical discussions
of the relative merits of the two stones. And there are traders in

flint, with stocks of knives and chisels and picks bought from
the miners who extract flint from shafts sunk thirty feet deep and
more in the chalk of Norfolk or the Channel coast.
It is overwhelmingly likely that other goods are displayed

for sale in the traders’ camps outside the stockades, but what
these are we of a later age can only surmise. Ornaments of jet

from Yorkshire are attested, and we may guess that there were
furs and buckskin shirts and moccasins and mats and baskets.
That these goods are bartered for corn is similarly only a con­
jecture, but there appears to have been little else that the settlers

could offer. The woolen cloth and piece goods which are a
staple of contemporary trade in the Middle East do not figure

here, for the settlers do not, apparently, weave cloth. Very oc­
casionally more exotic articles of foreign origin may have ap
peared at the marts, for bronze and gold, though scarce, can