Page 41 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

What use was all the bronze ot the east, it your cnnaren were
grown men before you returned? But they knew central Europe

well by repute as far as the Danube plain, for the people there
were their kinsfolk from the dawn of time. And, as we shall see

in a later chapter, ships came in every now and then across the
North Sea, from Britain and beyond, bearing what trade there
was and bringing the message of the passage-grave priests

from the far Mediterranean.

By the same channels the farmers of England and Scotland

and northern France and central Germany knew of the lands
of south Scandinavia, though they may well have looked on them
as backwoods areas, not far from the actual frontier regions

where, in the valleys of south Norway and central Sweden, the
impetus of colonization had died out, where the forests of oak

and ash gave way to the serried ranks of the pines, and the
short summers and severe winters made the life of the farmer
hard and bitter.

In the milder lands of southern England life was good—
though not radically different from that of the Danish home­

steaders. On this night when the Second Millennium b.c. began,
the earth ramparts of the corral on Windmill Hill lay deserted
under a powdering of snow. Only twice a year, at the spring and

autumn roundups, would the earthworks echo to the shouts and
laughter of herdsmen and spectators. Now, in the sheltered

wooded valleys below, the wattle villages lay snug, and closely
grouped. The cattle were out on the water meadows, with a mini­
mum of herdsmen. For the weather was milder then than now,

and there was no need, as in the more northern Denmark, to cor­
ral them for the winter and harvest leaves for their feed. (And

only with the worsening weather fifteen hundred years later
would it be necessary to bring them into the houses for the win­
ter.) The houses were lighter built, and less severely rectangular,

than the solid timber structures of Scandinavia, but their furnish­
ings were much the same. Bronze was, of course, more common,

though still imported from outside and therefore employed
mainly for ornament rather than wastefully for implements. Stone
and wood and flint must still suffice for these, though in this