Yet after this burst of objectivity he cannot resist the temptation to moralize, ending the paragraph with a comparison of the hardy, spirited Britons and the neighbouring Gauls, for many generations under Roman rule, ‘enervated by protracted peace’. The idea of the noble savage and the decadent Roman world is never far from his critical gaze. (Location 116)
Note: see also polybius. theories of decadence. protracted peace, no longer required to undergo the hardship of farming, corrupting sexual and deviant practises from the East etc.
The third tradition is an elaboration offering a direct line of descent from Japheth, through Aeneas, to a new character, Brutus, the founder of the British nation. This ingenious conflation, no doubt the product of the lively imagination of an unnamed British cleric, offers all things to all men: the British are now firmly placed in the European family that springs from Noah while being of the same stock as the founder of Rome and thus directly connected to a major event in world history, the fall of Troy. (Location 211)
Geoffrey was not without his critics. The great Welsh historian Giraldus Cambrensis (1146–1220), although he wanted to believe the British history, wondered why there was no corroboration from other sources. William of Newburgh, writing about 1190 in his Historia Rerum Anglicarum, was more forthright: ‘It is quite clear that everything this man wrote about Arthur and his successors, or indeed about his predecessors from Vortigern onwards, was made up, partly by himself and partly by others either from an inordinate love of lying or for the sake of pleasing the Britons.’ But these were lone voices. (Location 256)
Note: it’s hardly ‘wishful thinking’. the imagination as a communicative agent of sympathy, between inner nature (the aspect of learning required by scepticism regardless of Kant’s categorical imperatives), and ‘external’ nature (however defined in the snake dance of self and other) resulted in an increasing focus on what things looked like - their phenomenal and aesthetic aspectl
A generation later a Roman Catholic priest, Father John MacEnery (1796–1841), was excavating in the cave of Kent’s Cavern at Torquay. He laboured there from 1824 until 1829, finding remains spanning the prehistoric period. Low in the sequence he came upon a thick, unbroken deposit of stalagmite, which he dug through, finding beneath it flint implements directly associated with bones of extinct animals. In some excitement he wrote to William Buckland (1784–1856), who had been professor of geology at Oxford but was now dean of Westminster. Buckland was recognized as one of the foremost scholars of his time and his Reliquiae Diluvianae (1823) was a standard textbook on, as its subtitle tells us, ‘organic remains contained in caves, fissures, and diluvial gravel … attesting the action of an universal deluge’. He was, then, a scientist–clergyman who believed that scientific discoveries proved the Flood. Not unsurprisingly, when MacEnery presented his observations, Buckland was entirely dismissive. The artefacts, he argued, must have got below the stalagmite floor as the result of pits being dug through it by later Celtic occupants, allowing more recent material to mix with the extinct animal remains below. MacEnery was insistent that this was not so, but in deference to the famous scholar he delayed publication. ‘It is painful to dissent from so high an authority,’ he wrote, ‘and more particularly so from my concurrence generally in his views of the phenomena of these caves. (Location 530)
Like other geologists of his time, he believed that the geological record could only be interpreted in terms of there having been a series of catastrophes in the remote past, each followed by a new act of creation. (Location 544)
The reason why the Continental Shelf is so relevant to the very nature of Britain is that the shallow sea creates a special, and highly beneficial, environment. Rivers bring down nutrient-rich sediments, which (Location 635)
Note: this damp north western archipelago
Thereafter there was comparatively little variation except towards the beginning of the first millennium, when the previously warm, dry conditions gave way to a cooler, wetter phase. During the climatic optimum, c.1250–c.1000 BC, cultivation could take place up to 400 metres above sea-level, but as the weather became more stormy with mean temperatures falling by nearly 2 °C, the shortened growing season meant that many upland (Location 910)
A rather more esoteric form of aspiration is status attained by travel for the sake of having made a distant voyage and for gathering exotic artefacts and arcane knowledge. (Location 1071)
One of the earliest British proponents of the Scandinavian approach to craniology was the Bristol physician James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848), and it was through him that William Wilde (1815–76), an Irish ethnologist and doctor (who is invariably introduced in books of this kind with the irrelevance that he was the father of Oscar), (Location 1246)
Alongside the many and various expressions of symbolic behaviour there must be placed the dynamics of demography. Simply stated, if left unchecked, the population would increase exponentially; but there are always checks, most notably the holding capacity of the particular ecological niche in which the community lives. A given territory exploited by a particular technology could support only so many people. Once the population density approached the holding capacity, society had to institute changes. They could raise the holding capacity of their land by introducing new food-producing technologies or by exploiting new resources, they could change social conventions to make them less demanding of local products, or they could colonize more territory. Alternatively they could control the rate of population replacement by infanticide, or by enforcing constraints on marriage, or by warfare. There may also have been external factors affecting demography. Climatic deterioration, sea-level rise, depletion of soil nutrients through overcropping will all have had their effects. For many, life would have been a delicate balance—a constant contest with nature. (Location 1529)
They were communities who had traditionally relied on hunting reindeer and wild horse and who, rather than modify their subsistence strategies to suit the changing vegetation, chose to move northwards to keep up with the march of the ecological zone with which they were familiar. (Location 1596)
The left-hand photograph shows the tree as excavated in the 1930s. The right-hand photograph shows the trench re-excavated in 2010 to check the rate of deterioration caused by the lowering of the water-table (Location 1716)
After a century of inactivity the site was brought back into use and was visited on a regular basis for the next 130 years until around 8460 BC. (Location 1726)
Note: how was the site regarded during this period? like larkin’s churches.
No sharp distinctions would have existed between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’, between the physical world as observed and the spirit world as conceived: the one elided into the other. (Location 1881)
In other words, they identify the people in their landscape and provide visible and lasting references to their history. (Location 2251)
As to the frequency of those journeys we must remain ignorant: it may be that maritime contacts were continuous throughout the fourth millennium, but equally they could have been episodic, energized by particular events or charismatic individuals, with long periods of quiescence between. (Location 2338)
They were neutral territory, perhaps even liminal places between the secular, outer world and the realm of the deities. In such places the rules of society might be guaranteed by the authority of the gods, creating sanctuaries of safety for all. (Location 2379)
Note: See de la Mare
Yet the very form suggests that they were associated with some kind of procession through the landscape: in this way they contrasted with the causewayed enclosures, (Location 2400)
While the long barrows and causewayed enclosures were constructions with a clear ancestry in continental Europe, the cursus monuments would appear to be a British invention and may indeed have first developed in the north-east, in Scotland, where those with the earliest radiocarbon date can be found. They represent, then, an innovation reflecting new beliefs and practices that are truly British in origin. (Location 2404)
Those with the facility to acquire exotic things, and to take ownership of the power embedded in them, inhabited an extraordinary world where ever-expanding networks opened up new ways of obtaining power and knowledge: it was a restless world where people were always on the move. (Location 3041)
