Page 70 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

heap dwellers. Whenever more game or fish is taken than can be
used for the pot, it is carried or paddled the six miles to the near­

est farming village. The villagers are always glad for a change of
diet, and a willing customer can always be found to trade for a

length of homespun cloth, a polished flint ax, a pot or two, or a
measure of corn or of beer.
Sometimes a young man from the shell heaps will take serv­

ice for a season with the farmers, hunting for them and lending a
hand with the harvest. For a summer’s service he can earn a cow,
and many of the young men have begun, desultorily, to keep cat­

tle, and even to clear and sow a field. But the regular work en­
tailed in farming is uncongenial to them. Whenever the weather
is fine, they set out in their dugouts to the fishing banks; and at

any time a school of right whales or porpoises, or a seal or two,
may be sighted, and every man turns out to drive the beasts

ashore. So agriculture hardly gets the attention it deserves, and
most attempts to introduce it peter out.
They travel long distances in their dugouts, or in the larger

boats covered with sewn skins. They even occasionally visit their
cousins in the marshy lands of eastern England, sailing out on a

northeast wind with the big square sail set. For in the fens of
England there are also settlements of hunting, sealing, and fish­
ing folk, and many of them have come, within living memory,

from Denmark and Sweden. They are daring sailors, these fishers
of the North Sea, and some are already talking of signing on in

one of the big foreign ships that every now and then come into
local waters. They have talked about it to the local priest of the
passage-grave religion in his house in the nearby village of the

farmers. ...