Britain and Her People [antikvár]

Introduction'O noble fool! / A worthy fool! Motley's the only wear,' exclaims the melancholy Jaques of his memorable meeting with Touchstone in Shakespeare's play As You Like It. If by 'motley' we understand not only a jester's clothes but also the word heterogeneous, then it precisely describes the extraordinary mixture of races and cultures that have come to Britain from over the seas and have stayed to impress their traditions and personalities on the land and its inhabitants. They began to come about seven thousand years ago and have been coming ever since.When, in about 5,500 B.C., the forces of the Atlantic Ocean gathered strength and burst through the broad barrier of land which anchored the British mainlandto the massive expanse of Europe and Asia, creating an island and thereby forging the destinies of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, Man's history had already begun. In Mesopotamia tribes had been growing wild wheat and barley,domesticating dogs and herding sheep, goats and pigs for several thousand years. They had built settlements, too, inaugurating a new civilisation in which people no longer moved from place to place foraging for food but had a home base. They could make laws, construct monuments to their dead and build altars to the spirits that they believed regulated man's existence.The first permanent Britons, like the Mesopotamians, were farmers. By about 4,000 B.C. they were growing several kinds of crops and keeping cattle, as well as goats, sheep and pigs. They made pottery and used stone and flint implements to clear the forests and work the land and to fashion timber from which to build both houses and the intricate underground vaults in which they buried their family dead. Where stone was readily available, as it was in westernBritain and in Scotland, this was used for building instead of wood. In about 3,000 B.C. a particularly intrepid band of farmers embarked with their families, cattle and sheep in wooden boats and sailed, or paddled, out into the unknown seas to the north of Scotland. They missed the island of Hoy and landed at Skara Brae on the western mainland of Orkney. Here they constructed an underground village complex from stone slabs, furnishing the cell-like dwellings with stone beds, tables and storage boxes and putting in individual drainage systems. Later Stone Age people were responsible for the vast stone monuments of which there are about nine hundred dotted around Britain. The most awe-inspiring and mysterious of all these is Stonehenge, which was a thousand years in the building. Amongst these people there arrived a new group, known as the Beaker Folk because of their distinctive drinking vessels. They brought with them a knowledge of gold, which was to be found especially in Ireland, and of copper, which they taught the native craftsmen to mix with tin from the mines in Cornwall to make bronze.Facing page: modem day motley at the International Clowns Convention, Bognor Regis. Top left: contemporary druids celebrate the summer solstice at Stonehenge. Top right: the British weather - a rainy day on the front at St Ives, Cornwall.