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A Night in an Iron Age Hillfort - Episode 20
144 Plays7 years ago
Kim Biddulph and friends spent the night in an Iron Age Hillfort sharing food, exchanging stories, and discussion ideas. It was an amazing night full of fun and excitement. The audio is a bit challenging at times, as you would expect it to be in this situation, but we've cleaned it up a bit and most should be OK.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Prehistories Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Prehistories podcast with me, Kim Biddelph. In
Exploring Fictional Narratives in Prehistory
00:00:17
Speaker
this podcast, if you haven't listened before, I usually like to talk about fiction set in prehistory, and that's mostly been books, although we have moved into graphic novels a little bit, and we're also going to be thinking about films set in prehistory in future episodes.
Recording in an Iron Age House
00:00:37
Speaker
But today, this episode is actually set in a reconstructed Iron Age house in a museum called the Chilton Open Air Museum that I often work at with my colleagues from the museum. And we are sitting in the museum, in the Iron Age roundhouse at night, sitting around the fire and telling each other
00:01:01
Speaker
funny stories which for some reason seem to involve quite a lot about food dye.
Humorous Storytelling in Iron Age Setting
00:01:12
Speaker
And one day I packed up a blue food cart and served them bright blue chicken soup. We lived with rice and mushrooms and it was almost fluorescent, it was really quite startling. And they shut up.
00:01:28
Speaker
I used blue food column work runs to try and stop people nicking my milk. All that happened was somebody threw it out and said, oh, I thought it had gone off.
Purpose and Features of the Chilton Open Air Museum
00:01:40
Speaker
So the Chilton Open Air Museum is a museum just near London and its main purpose is to rescue historic buildings from around the Chiltons. But it has one building that wasn't rescued but has been reconstructed and this is the Iron Age house.
00:02:00
Speaker
It's based on an excavated Iron Age house from Dunstable Downs and at night, the first time that I'd slept in it, it is very atmospheric with just the light from the fire.
00:02:26
Speaker
Although we were dressed in modern clothes and had brought camp beds to sleep on so that we could be nice and comfortable, there was something timeless about sitting around this fire, eating pottage, which had been made by one of our number, Foxturner, who had made it many times before on an open fire in these lovely pots.
Educational Storytelling and Colleague Introductions
00:02:49
Speaker
And there was just enough to share around.
00:02:53
Speaker
And as we were talking and sharing these stories and making each other laugh, we all just sat close to the fire, staring into it.
00:03:05
Speaker
The dancing flames just kept us all entranced. It was quite something to, inside the house, which is a roundhouse, which is very peculiar to Britain, these roundhouses, you feel very protected in there and cut off from the outside world, although you'd only have to walk through the door and there you are in the luminous moonlight outside. So it was a good setting, I think, to talk about stories in prehistory.
00:03:36
Speaker
Well, very nice. Thanks, Fox. There's some lefty people and more. Can I tell you a story? Mm-hmm.
00:03:46
Speaker
So the people that I was with in the Iron Age house that night were many of my colleagues who also work in the Iron Age house to teach children about Iron Age life or talk to families when they come and help them experience what life would have been like.
Conveying Iron Age Life to Children
00:04:04
Speaker
So there was my friend Ginny Simpson, Claire Walsh, Sean Hamilton Fraser, Anna Poole, Kathy and Andrew Simpson, Steve Norris, Fox Turner and Isabel Bear the dog.
00:04:06
Speaker
Okay. Okay.
00:04:18
Speaker
We all work at Co-Am, most of us, but not exclusively there, at the Children's Open Air Museum. We're a mix of teachers and archaeologists and live interpreters and reenactors, and we all bring something a little different to help bring this house to life for people. We all have very different backgrounds and interests, and we learn from each other.
00:04:43
Speaker
One of the things I've been thinking about a lot in the Iron Age house is how do we show that people told stories? What stories can we tell to children when they come into the Iron Age house so that they can experience some of what we experienced? We like to shut the doors on the children at some point and make it dark, but it's nothing compared to how dark it was in the Iron Age house that night.
Discussion on 'Arthur and the King of the Britons'
00:05:10
Speaker
I'm just picking up a snoring at the moment, as a dog. And so the book that I wanted to talk to people about that night, actually two books really, the first was Arthur and the King of the Britons by Miles Russell, which is a very recent book. It's basically popular history
00:05:33
Speaker
looking at the texts of earlier authors, particularly from the 12th century, well and before, and thinking about what sources they had access to, to write some of the stories, particularly focusing on Geoffrey of Monmouth who wrote A History of the Kings of Britain in about 1130, that kind of time, AD.
00:05:57
Speaker
and because it was written over a thousand years after the Romans had invaded and the Britons themselves had obviously changed massively when the Romans came and then the Anglo-Saxons had come and brought their own stories and history with them
00:06:16
Speaker
It was thought, well, you know, Geoffrey of Monmouth, even in the 12th century, most people thought that it was a load of rubbish. He said that he had access to sources that had previously not been seen, but he didn't say anything else. And he said that these were the stories of the ancient, the real stories of the ancient kings of Britain, but nobody believed him, sadly.
00:06:41
Speaker
And when I was studying archaeology, this was also the line that we took, that he was just making things up. But the book by Miles Russell has changed my view somewhat, although I think his theory is not
00:07:06
Speaker
entirely proved but he looks he's done a textual analysis of Geoffrey of Monmouth and it looks like at certain points he changes his narrative into it and it really changes style into a kind of epic poem of the battles and the betrayals and
00:07:29
Speaker
stories of these kings of Britain. And even though some of the names have been mangled over the years, possibly because Geoffrey of Monmouth was reading some old sources that had written things down differently and he wasn't used to those kind of Iron Age names, that you can, by the details of the story, match it up often with classical sources like Julius Caesar.
Immersive Team Experiences in the Iron Age House
00:07:57
Speaker
to see who Geoffrey of Monmouth is actually talking about. And we get the Britons point of view, for instance, of the invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar. So this is what I want to put to the team and see what they think.
00:08:13
Speaker
So hello everybody, welcome to Priya Stories. And this one is a little bit of a strange one because I'm recording it inside a replica Iron Age roundhouse that I often work in and I'm recording it with the team that I work with. So, everyone introduce themselves please. Ginny? Yes, hello, I'm Ginny. Hello, I'm Claire Wolves. Hi, I'm Sean Hamilton Fraser.
00:08:51
Speaker
So I think that everyone over that side of the fire is going to have to speak up so that my little tiny microphone can pick everyone up.
00:09:03
Speaker
So we're in the Iron Age house and we're doing a sleepover tonight in the Iron Age house. The fire is roaring, the potatoes are cooking, which not particularly.
00:09:15
Speaker
Authentic, but never mind. It's going to be yummy. And we've all got beer, which is very authentic. Cider. We have just eaten an amazing, excellent pot of tea with pork and herbs and onions and pulses. That's pretty iron age. It is. It's pretty good. Out of the iron age pots, too. Yeah.
00:09:37
Speaker
So we're going to have a good time tonight, but very briefly, I'm going to record a little podcast with you guys. Thank you very much for letting me impose on this evening. And we missed somebody out. We're also joined by Bear. Isabel. Isabel.
00:09:57
Speaker
What you can't see here, in fact, is us trying to make a very large Iron Age dog announce her presence. Good girl. Very well behaved Iron Age dog. And Iron Age dog who sat and smelt the cottage. And didn't. Didn't get any. Yet any is about that.
00:10:26
Speaker
So we all kind of work in this building, don't we?
Engaging Children Through Sensory Experiences
00:10:31
Speaker
What's your best experience? Can anyone want to tell us your favourite experience in this house? I think mine would be the first time I slept in here with several of the junior members of staff here at Tilton Open Air Museum. And it was the first time we'd slept over in the Iron Age house. We'd always said it would be an amazing venue for sleepover.
00:10:54
Speaker
As the fire died down, we all shuffled off to our beds and got under our blankets. Just listening to everybody else gently fall asleep around me and watching the fire like the crackling of the fire was the most wonderful feeling. And all you could hear around you was the sound of the outside world, the owls and the, the Amazon and the woods and the crackle of the fire and the gentle snoring of several junior members of staff who perhaps never indulged just a little on sheep beer. But it was still a magical evening.
00:11:26
Speaker
Well this is my first time sleeping over in the Iron Age house so I'm very excited about staying here tonight. Anybody else got any, any favourite story? For me it's the other end of the day when we come in to set up workshops and we're actually lighting the fire and waking the building up. I love walking down through the woods and coming in and lighting the fire and just seeing it come alive in the mornings.
00:11:55
Speaker
And you can see the steam rising off the thatch, can't you, outside? Yep, wonderful. And that's incredible, actually, because people always say,
00:12:02
Speaker
Where's the chimney? Why isn't there a hole for a chimney? We have to explain that. Actually, the last thing you want to do is to use an updraft, which brings your fire up into the fat. And that's why there is no central hole in the roof here. There is no chimney. And we've always said to people, all the smoke just trickles out through the fat. But actually standing outside this evening and watching that happen was really, really amazing. Yeah, it was really billowing out, I think.
00:12:30
Speaker
I think for me, it's when I'm teaching the kids and I've got them sitting around the fire and then I tell them that I'm going to shut the door. So I shut the door and there's always this sort of gasp because the whole house comes alive, doesn't it? It's completely different with the door shut and it gives the children such different experience, like nothing that's really good for. Yeah. It's something completely immersive.
00:12:54
Speaker
It isn't just reading a book or looking at a picture. There's something about walking into history like this where you have not just the sight but the smell and the sound of the past. That's very difficult to recreate. I think it's wonderful to have the opportunity to do that here. And I think the smell carried around with you afterwards as well. If you go to Tesco after working here then everyone gives you funny looks.
00:13:24
Speaker
And I always think, oh my God, I'm so smelly. I don't mind it whilst I'm here, but when I get home, I have to have a shower straight away, otherwise I feel sick with the smell of the wood smoke. But it's beautiful whilst I'm here. Yeah, but it's the first time that I'll have slept here overnight. And I think that the two impressions for me at the moment is really how very warm the fire is and how focal
00:13:53
Speaker
the fire is and that, you know, everything, it seems it feels very protective, very safe. And you just glance out through the doorway and say to me that I haven't realised it had actually gone completely dark. And I certainly don't get about where I live, that complete darkness at any point. And it just, it's the opposites, isn't it? I feel that quite powerfully.
00:14:18
Speaker
I think you're right, there's a very real sense of warmth and comfort and safety and togetherness in here and outside the world is colder and darker and the sounds are funny and quite what might be out there, whereas in here it does feel like a very safe space.
00:14:33
Speaker
And we can just see each other's faces through the light of the fire. And we always tell kids, well I do anyway, I don't know about you guys, but I tell them that the fire is like the TV. So you look at it and watch it and you can't help but watch it and keep on watching it all evening sometimes.
Appropriate Stories for Iron Age Settings
00:14:51
Speaker
So you can let the TV do that to you. And it's basically because it's like that fire. As a reenactor, we've always called it medieval television. It's quite compelling once you start watching it.
00:15:04
Speaker
And that last portion of potage is coming to me, I've read. You passed the ball then, Jeanine. Thank you. So what's missing though is some stories.
00:15:14
Speaker
And I've had problems thinking about the stories that I tell children. What do I tell them? And I know that some of us have told the story of Boudica, but that doesn't seem quite right because we're here at the Chilton Open Air Museum, which is near Amisham in the Chiltons. It's not in East Anglia. So why are we telling the story of Boudica here?
00:15:36
Speaker
But the problem is that we don't really have any stories from this area. I know some of you tell stories. Cathy, you sometimes tell stories to children, don't you? Yes, I am aware of the tradition of the large, scary dog that appears out of the darkness quite often for telling a death, and so on, in the folk story tradition.
00:16:04
Speaker
And particularly thinking about meeting Isabel, who is not a small dog by any means, heavier than I am, which is nice to think about, actually. I can quite see how coming across a large animal unexpectedly would lead to this sort of superstition. I'm aware, well, I mean, I was going to say there's no documentary evidence. There's very little documentary evidence of
00:16:33
Speaker
the times we're talking about, there is no evidence of this sort of story being told.
00:16:39
Speaker
But I can see how the tradition would grow up, sitting round safely inside. You don't quite know what's going on out there. And Fox was saying earlier that there's bone evidence of large dogs from the Iron Age. So I now feel slightly more confident that the stories I'm telling probably were part of not of an epic, heroic
Historical Credibility of Folk Tales
00:17:09
Speaker
tradition of storytelling, but a folk and stay indoors overnight because you never know what you're going to meet type storytelling.
00:17:21
Speaker
And in that later Iron Age, we were well known. It's kind of proto-historical. It's often called, isn't it? It's kind of we're written about rather than writing ourselves. And so Caesar and a few of the other classical authors write about us. And write about Britain, I should say, because it's very easy to assume that there are ancestors. But I know I've got heritage from all over the world.
00:17:47
Speaker
And hunting dogs is one of those things that Britain was really famous for. It's great hunting dogs. That's you Isabelle. Cheers. She'd be a very average sort of a hunting dog, if we're honest. It's just training, isn't it?
00:18:06
Speaker
But there was something tremendously valuable about a big, strong, solid, heavy dog like this. Absolutely. It was improvised for a very long time because London had recordable evidence for their abilities to guard the family, to guard the household, to guard stock and produce and armies and all the things that were important. Does anyone else tell any other stories from here? Is there anything that kind of springs to mind?
00:18:32
Speaker
There's the talk story. Yeah. Yeah, I love that story. The one I use is the wedding one. Mm-hmm. Because we have a talk in here and I bring it out for the kids and I usually select one of the children, put a talk around their neck and then put a cloak on them and describe how it's my wife's talk and she got it when she was married. Oh, that sort of talk. That sort of talk. Not the other sort. T-O-R-C. That's right.
00:18:58
Speaker
And then actually looking at it, describe how the actual ends represent the mother and the child and that sort of idea and then how the ceremony and how we all gathered together as a family and just putting that together in their minds. Yeah, it's beautiful. Did you create that story or did you get that from someone?
00:19:17
Speaker
That partly came from Tom. We all remember Tom. We all remember. Ah, the sainted Tom. Ah, the old Tom. He started on that story and it was Snetish gone. The Snetish board, yeah.
00:19:33
Speaker
and it's all branched out from there and I saw built up on that saying it was my wife, instead it was a fine which might have been belonging to... It's much more personal, isn't it? You weave it into your own story of your character. If you can relate it to yourself and your family, then it's more believable. So the kids start believing that you are an Iron Age person who lives in this house, who has a family who are out there looking after sheep or whatever.
00:20:00
Speaker
It seems like Norfolk is really the place to be in the Iron Age. They seem to have all the gold and all this. I started my career in archaeology right next door to Snettisham in a little village called Sedgford. I was starting with Anglo-Saxon stuff, but it was very boring.
00:20:18
Speaker
And they were Christian as well, both. They're not buried with anything, you know? They're just unhelpful. Yeah, very unhelpful. There's no grave goods or anything. Anybody listening, make sure you're buried with interesting things that have them say future after future. Thank you. They will. They will, absolutely. That's a good reason for being cremated, actually.
00:20:39
Speaker
Unless you're a workshop leader and you're buried with all your stuff, then archaeologists will not thank you. I'll be confused. You get buried with a Roman coin and like a... Yeah, and a... Saxon pendant. And a modern wristwatch. And a radio. And of course radio carbonation doesn't really work on us anymore, does it? No. Feelings in our teeth. You know, steel pins in our legs and whatever. All sorts of things that would really muck up future archaeologists.
00:21:16
Speaker
On that note we're going to take a quick break and we'll be back after a few minutes.
00:21:25
Speaker
Hey podcast fans, check out the Arc 365 podcast at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash Arc 365. That's A-R-C-H 365 for your daily dose of archeology. Each episode is less than 15 minutes long and we have some great guests recording about awesome
Analyzing Geoffrey's Blending of Poetry and History
00:21:40
Speaker
archeology. We also try to throw in some definitions and basic archeological information. So check out the 365 days of archeology podcast only in 2017 at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash Arc 365 today.
00:21:54
Speaker
Find us also on iTunes, Stitcher Radio and Google Music by typing art365 into the search. Now back to the show.
00:22:15
Speaker
Well, because I've been searching for stories to tell in here, and you know, you go to the Iron Age, what could be Iron Age literature, Irish sagas and Welsh myths and legends, and you think, well, yes, that's great, but would they have been told at this time? And over here in the southeast, where we are,
00:22:37
Speaker
And then, I saw this book. So, obviously, usually in the podcast I talk about books. Now, this is not a story book. It is... Well, it's not really an academic book. It's popular history, really. And it's called Arthur and the Kings of Britain by Miles Russell. But it's actually not about King Arthur at all. I don't think he's hardly mentioned.
00:22:59
Speaker
But it's about a book called The History of the Kings of Britain that was written in 1131 A.D. by a man who called himself... Do you mind? I'll wait and tell you about it. Sorry. And he called himself Geoffrey of Mumworth.
00:23:21
Speaker
He may have been from Monmouth, but he actually was working in Oxford. Anyway, that's not really the point. But Miles Russell is basically, well, Geoffrey from Monmouth's work has been dismissed by everyone from the 12th century onwards. Everybody says that he's just made it all up, and he claims that he got all of his stories from ancient texts that no one had ever seen before.
00:23:43
Speaker
and then all those texts have been lost and we haven't found them and all that stuff. Which is why he's been dismissed and I remember when I did my degree we mentioned him and then he said but it's not based on anything it doesn't have any fact.
00:23:58
Speaker
But Miles Russell has kind of done a bit of a textural analysis of Jeffery of Monmouth and has basically shown that, well, I think it's pretty convincing that he's shown that Jeffery of Monmouth has lifted sections of epic poetry and possibly written or at least told in the Iron Age, particularly the late Iron Age, because it ties in quite nicely with Caesar.
00:24:24
Speaker
So of course Julius Caesar invades twice, doesn't do very well, goes away, takes over Rome, gets killed. So in this we've got an opposing viewpoint.
00:24:37
Speaker
And in this, in Geoffrey of Monmouth, it has two opposing viewpoints, but he didn't realise that they were two different stories. This is what Miles Russell was saying. He kind of tries to weave the two traditions together, and one tradition has a man called Androgyus as the hero, and another one has a man called Cassibalornus as the hero. Do we know that name? Yes.
00:25:05
Speaker
and they add in details that Caesar doesn't tell you because of course Caesar was seeing it from his own point of view.
00:25:12
Speaker
And that is really quite interesting. So the only thing that happens that Geoffrey of Monmouth does is that he doesn't understand the names of the places. So he thinks Trinovantum, and this is a very old idea, that Trinovantum is a place rather than a group of people, and we know that the tribe is called the Trinovantes, and they were based mainly in Essex.
00:25:36
Speaker
But Geoffrey of Monmouth read it as Troy a Nova, knew Troy and said it was London. And this comes from a very, very old story that Britain was actually founded by one of the Trojan princes that had escaped after the Trojan War and come to Britain and he was called Brutus and that's why it's called Britain. So he mistakes Trinavantes for Trinavantum and puts it in a different place.
00:26:04
Speaker
He also mistakes the Cat of a Lorny area for Cornwall and calls it Cornubia and thinks it's about Cornwall. So he makes the story about the whole of southern Britain but it looks like he's talking about people
00:26:23
Speaker
Like Tenuantius is probably Tascio Varnus, who we've got on coins from Verillamium and Camelodunum, which is now St. Albans and Colchester. Androgyus is probably Mandibrachius, is what he's suggesting here. And Casoballornus, that's quite a nice one because that fits in with what Caesar calls him, Casoballornus. And Vianbia, basically, it's changeable at this point.
00:26:53
Speaker
So it's, I think we can actually use this story when we talk about it and talk about Caesar's failed invasions from our point of view, from the point of view of Casa Valornas, because we are deep in Casa Valorna territory, so Casa Valornas would be our hero and I think we can talk about this.
00:27:21
Speaker
the uh Jeffrey's writing changes from lists of kings to epic poem when he talks about some of these battles and can I read you a little bit? And wave your arms round a bit because you're very wonderful shadows. Oh yeah oh look at that that's amazing.
00:27:42
Speaker
So, as the two sides made contact, the Emperor's company came very near to being scattered by the close ranks of the invading Britons. They all fought together in a confused melee, and Neneus had the extraordinary luck of meeting Julius in person.
00:27:56
Speaker
As he rushed at Caesar, Nenius rejoiced in his heart at the fact that he would be able to deal at least one blow at so great a man. Caesar saw Nenius charging at him. He warded his opponent off with his shield and struck him on his helmet with his naked sword. Caesar lifted his sword a second time with the intention of following up his first blow and dealing a fatal wound. Nenius saw what he was at and held out his own shield.
00:28:19
Speaker
Caesar's sword glanced off Nenius's helmet and cut into his shield so deeply that when they had to abandon their hand to fight because of the troops who crowded in on them, the emperor could not wrench his sword out. Having acquired Caesar's sword in this way, Nenius threw away his own, dragged the other weapon out, and hurried off to attack the enemy with it. That's really interesting, because that's written from the point of view, and he's absolutely seeing battles. Yeah.
00:28:46
Speaker
And I don't think Jeffrey Mommer could be that guy.
Interpreting Myths and Historical Value
00:28:48
Speaker
No. Because he was a monk.
00:28:50
Speaker
But there are several me and that for the months of this evening, and I think that's quite a nice little eye-witting description of that. Yeah, nice little description of Hantan combat. Yeah. And then taking his sword. Yeah. I mean, why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you just use his sword? I mean, bloody hell. That would be awesome. And when Gordon does his bit about his Roman sword and shield that he's taken from the enemy... Can we base him this? Yeah.
00:29:17
Speaker
And we're talking about shields made of wood and leather, perhaps. Absolutely, it's entirely possible that you've captured, that you've caught your own sword in that. And you've jerked your own other way and kept that sword. That's fascinating. So I think we can go back to Geoffrey of Monmouth and lift some of these pieces out. There's this next bit. The Britons pressed forward with their ranks undivided. As they charged boldly on, God favoured them and victory was theirs.
00:29:48
Speaker
Caesar withdrew to a line between his camp and the ships for his. Romans were being cut to pieces. And it's lovely, because it's from the Britain's point of view, and not that propaganda that Caesar always talks about. I don't think you're biased in any way. Well, Romans are boring. You had it here first, people. What have the Romans done for us?
00:30:16
Speaker
But what's lovely as well is that it talks about this, that actually the main enemy was the Trinavantes. And there's loads of stuff about how sometimes the catabolorny end up being able to control the Trinavantes territory, and sometimes it's the other way around. And they mentioned Cantia as well, which is probably Kent, and how they are dukes.
00:30:42
Speaker
that pay homage to Casablornus or Taskiovanus or Knobelin, who comes in later. And I think maybe we can go back to Geoffrey and mine it for stories. It's fascinating to look at a quite an established and very well-known work with completely fresh eyes. It is amazing, actually, yeah.
00:31:07
Speaker
And then that's got a sort of basis in truth. All of that stuff where he talks about King Bladdard, do you know the story of King Bladdard? He's the mythical founder of Bath. But is he so mythical? When he was a prince, he was sent to Greece to learn philosophy.
00:31:34
Speaker
but when he came back he had leprosy. So he was thrown out of the court and he went to
00:31:44
Speaker
to live in the woods and be a swine herd. Sadly, he gave the swine leprosy too. Not entirely sure how he did that. I saw this horrible thing on Twitter today, which is a creationist version of evolution, and it has a man raping a dinosaur, which is just absolutely amazing. Anyway, well, although I think the dinosaur was enjoying it.
00:32:12
Speaker
That's victim shaming, that is. Sorry, it is, it is. You called me on that one. So a serious historical podcast you said? I never said serious. Where were we? Oh yeah, King Bladder. I think dinosaurs are burning. Well, let's go back to the swine. So King Bladder somehow gave leprosy to the swine.
00:32:35
Speaker
and he would collect acorns for them in the forest and as he was walking along the River Avon he found a spring which was a lovely warm spring with bubbling water, smelled a little bit weird, a little bit green but the pigs went off and wallowed in it and lo and behold when they came out they were cured of their leprosy.
00:32:54
Speaker
and so gladdered himself went and covered himself in the mud of this spring and was cured and went back to his father and became the next king and in thanks to the spirits of the spring he founded the city of Bath.
00:33:15
Speaker
and there are statues of Bladdard and one of the swine. Around Bath, actually. If you ever wondered what they were when you were in Bath, that's fine. And so, it's a ridiculous story. But, you know, how true is it? And then his son was Leah.
00:33:44
Speaker
And the Mia story obviously is very, you know, it's quite a legend, isn't it? It's got all of those elements of legend. But, you know, how much of it is true?
00:34:02
Speaker
I think what's so interesting about these stories is their relationship to the Roman stories which are obviously very well documented because of all the different strands of Roman religion that there are, how they're sort of interwoven within the folklore and the myths and legends of the people who were already in the places where the Romans came to settle. And Ashley, Miles Russell does point out the fact that people of Britain
00:34:31
Speaker
were very, very keen on this Brutus story because it made them on the same level. They made them equal with Rome because Rome was also the mythical foundation. Well, one of the mythical stories of the foundation, but not Romulus and Remus, but another one, is that it was founded by people escaping from Troy.
Timeless Nature of Storytelling
00:34:52
Speaker
So the Britons were very keen on this story.
00:34:57
Speaker
And of course the ironator people sent there, or some of the tribes sent their sons over to Rome, to live in Rome, as hostages. Yes. So we could talk about the Trinavantes being, you know, traitors to the British sending their sons to learn Roman ways. But eventually the captain of Lorny were quite pleased with the Roman rule as well.
00:35:29
Speaker
One wonders how many other works out there you could look at with this sort of revisionist style. Now people are starting to understand a little bit more about this period of history which has been little understood, I think, for a very long time. It's just uninteresting and boring and uncivilized. There's just such a wealthy material out there if we know where to look at it with the right eyes.
00:35:59
Speaker
And I think it's also lovely that we've got what are potentially stories from this part of Britain, South, East, what is now England, where this area has been devoid of any kind of literary tradition at all until the Anglo-Saxon story.
00:36:21
Speaker
And how lovely it is to talk about this with the backdrop of the, I don't know how much of my friend's picking up, but this just gently crackling fire, snoring dog. This gentle murmur of conversation. It's a very timeless experience. And to talk about the kinds of things we're talking about is just lovely. Really rare opportunity. Well, thank you so much, everybody. It's been lovely to.
00:36:47
Speaker
to talk to you. Thank you. And I might just keep recording a little bit to just record some sounds, ambient sounds of the INH house. No, but the grisbak is done. Yeah, there's some creative anachronisms going on today, including podcast equipment, obviously. So thank you so much, everyone.
00:37:12
Speaker
I remember said, has anybody been to Cousinsdon medieval village in South Wales? No, I've heard that. Many times. They recreated a medieval village from some amazing archaeological remains and they rebuilt all the buildings that were in the settlement.
00:37:30
Speaker
And the most wonderful thing, when I was there, was hearing American tourists ask whether they just sort of scraped away the earth from the roofs down, to expose these fantastic buildings. Very much like here, they've all been rebuilt. And I remember spending one night sitting in their central building, which is a meeting place of sorts. It's the largest building there at the site.
00:37:57
Speaker
There must have been 30 or 40 other women actors there. And for all that the conversation was about modern things, it was about television and football and computers and our jobs and that movie. If you just let your ears just defocus slightly, somebody was playing a penny whistle in a corner and you had children laughing and this sort of gentle rise and fall conversation and the sound of the fire in the heart.
00:38:26
Speaker
And again, it was that amazingly timeless experience, just part of the stepping outside of time somehow into an arena that was slightly different, that was timeless. And it's very much like it is this evening, I think. We're busting Chris Beckett's and we're talking about things that are modern. But actually, if you just tune up just a tiny bit, this is the sort of experience that humans have been undergoing for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
Cultural Impact of Geoffrey's Myths
00:38:50
Speaker
It's part of an amazing continuity.
00:38:58
Speaker
One of my favourite places is Carcassonne. I don't know if anyone's been there.
00:39:05
Speaker
It's a medieval fortified city in southern France and it's just, it's so tacky and it's so touristy, but it means that it's always busy and just the streets are bustling with people and it's almost like if you unfocus your eyes and your ears, although of course they're all speaking in loads of different languages as well, which makes it feel like it's a very cosmopolitan city and a tiny, tiny city and you just see all the people.
00:39:34
Speaker
The conversation carried on well into the night but this is where we're going to take a little break and when we come back it's just going to be me bringing out a few more ideas from this book.
00:39:51
Speaker
Interested in archaeology? Want to hear from experts in the field about the latest discoveries and interpretations? Check out The Archaeology Show every other Saturday and let hosts Chris Webster and April Camp Whitaker take you deeper into the story. Check out The Archaeology Show at www.archpodnet.com forward slash archaeology and subscribe, rate, and comment on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, and the Google Music Store. That's www.archpodnet.com forward slash archaeology. Now back to the show.
00:40:19
Speaker
So welcome back. Next morning after I recorded this podcast, after we'd slept over in the Iron Age house, we woke up early as the light was streaming in through the gaps in the door and rekindled the fire. When we opened the door, it was quite an atmospheric sound.
00:40:57
Speaker
And the light just streamed in and lit up the whole house in a way that it hadn't done the night before and left us in the dark. Then, in a very inauthentic way, but it was very necessary, I made some coffee on the fire. Can you hear this?
00:41:30
Speaker
That's one of those espresso makers and it was very necessary after quite a late night. We made some breakfast as well. If I can locate the sound for this.
00:41:57
Speaker
Oh, that sound reminds me of a very welcome breakfast that next morning. And then we had to clear out the Iron Age house so that visitors could come and not realise that we'd been sleeping there all night.
00:42:17
Speaker
It was lovely to talk to my colleagues about the stories that we use and potential stories that we could use more of. But I want to think about how we do this and how we present them, because these stories are the legends of the people that we are representing. And we sometimes work totally in character and sometimes not.
00:42:43
Speaker
But we need to get across that these are not true stories about how Britain, how the people behaved and what they did, but that they are almost that kind of legendary type of story and a very heroic story where you've got to take it with a pinch of salt.
00:43:07
Speaker
So it'd be really interesting to work out how to do this, and that's a conversation that I'll continue to have with all of my colleagues. But for anybody else who lives and works in southeast England, then it's actually really useful to read this
Geoffrey's Misinterpretations and Reinterpretations
00:43:26
Speaker
book.
00:43:26
Speaker
If you want, if you're looking, it's a very niche market, I know, but if you are looking specifically to represent the Iron Age people, late Iron Age people in southeast England, then the stories are all in Geoffrey of Monmouth. There you go, just use them. Now, many of the stories in Geoffrey of Monmouth, I mean, do deal with Arthur a little bit and his father and uncle and Merlin and all that stuff. And there are some fantastic stories about how
00:43:52
Speaker
Merlin brings the stones for Stonehenge from Ireland and sets them up and they were originally part of a giant's ring of circles because of course the first inhabitants of Britons were clearly giants.
00:44:10
Speaker
But there's, you know, the stories that take in Ireland and Wales and Cornwall. But what Miles Russell is suggesting is, sadly, I don't want to take these away from all of those places, but that actually the central stories that Geoffrey of Monmouth were using were primarily in southeast England and they only bring in Cornwall and Ireland and Wales because
00:44:37
Speaker
Geoffrey of Monmouth was misreading either by accident or on purpose to make the stories more widely applicable. So, for instance, the story of Brutus being the mythical founder of Britain was actually used in an earlier text by Nenius who wrote the history of Britain.
00:45:03
Speaker
And it's clearly a very deep-seated myth that the Britons would have had about where their country came from, where their people came from, which is really interesting given that, of course, actually the people had just been there since the last Ice Age. So there's the reality and then there's what people in the past thought about their own past.
00:45:32
Speaker
So Nenius talks about how Brutus was travelled from Troy and
00:45:48
Speaker
and moved to, eventually, to Britain through Gaul and through Italy. Well, he gives a couple of different stories about Brutus, whether or not he was actually a consul in Rome and then was chucked out.
00:46:07
Speaker
or whether he and and quite you know quite descended from the people of of Troy but by quite a few generations or whether he went straight there from from Troy so Nenius describes how
00:46:36
Speaker
how Brutus actually gets to Britain and sets up a new dynasty of kings, great dynasty of kings. And Brutus, sorry, Geoffrey of Monmouth takes this story and he gives several different versions as well. But
00:46:58
Speaker
most of the first book of his Historia is about Brutus's journey and at one point he's in Greece and he encounters a Diana's temple on an island called Leogetia, I don't know where that would be,
00:47:18
Speaker
And he asks Diana, in which lands do you wish us to dwell? And Diana responds, to the west, beyond the kingdoms of Gaul, lies an island of the ocean surrounded by the sea, an island of the ocean where giants once lived.
00:47:36
Speaker
but now is deserted and waiting for your people. Sail to it. It will be your home forever. It will furnish your children with a new Troy. From your descendants will arise kings who will be masters of the whole world." But Jeffrey also put something else in there. So
00:47:58
Speaker
let me find that bit where he whilst Brutus is in Greece he actually comes across some other Trojans who had been exiled from Troy and kept captive in Greece and
00:48:15
Speaker
Brutus frees them, and they were led by a man named Carinius. So Geoffrey says, as soon as they had realised that his stock was of such high antiquity, they took him into alliance with them straight away, together with the people over whom he ruled. Later Cornwall was named after the, called after the name of this leader. In every battle he was of more help to Brutus than anyone else.
00:48:44
Speaker
particularly when they come to Gaul, Carinius was very instrumental in winning a battle against Gopharius the Pict apparently who ruled the area. So Carinius took fresh heart calling his old men old
00:49:07
Speaker
men over to the right of the battle arranged them in fighting formation and charged headlong at the enemy. With his troops in close order he broke through their ranks in front and went on killing the enemy until he had worked right through their force and compelled them all to flee. He lost his sword but by good luck he had a battle axe and anything he struck with this he cut into from top to bottom. Brutus was greatly impressed by his boldness and courage so were his comrades and so indeed were the enemy.
00:49:38
Speaker
So Corinius ends up being a co-founder of Britain and Cornwall is named after him according to Geoffrey which places Cornwall on a very high footing almost as a separate kingdom to the rest of Britain and obviously you can see the basis of that in quite a lot of myths about Cornwall.
00:49:59
Speaker
But it probably, I'm sorry Cornwall people, I'm really sorry, it probably is referring to someone who was seen as the founder of someone to the west of Troianova, which we know from the discussions earlier.
00:50:20
Speaker
Excuse me. That was a sneeze. I have had a bit of a cold recently. I'm sorry if you are listening to this and find that off-putting. So Cornwall is actually the place to the west of the Trinovantes tribe, the Troyanova that Geoffrey of Monmouth mistranslated.
00:50:46
Speaker
And of course to the west of the Trinavantes is the Cattu Voloni. So you can see that there are these links that the letters, some of the letters are different. But what do you think? Something to the west of Britain that begins with a C? It must be in Cornwall. That's basically what Geoffrey of Monmouth was doing.
00:51:08
Speaker
So we in the southeast can kind of take back some of these stories that have been used as the mythical background to a lot of places in southern Britain because they look like they were stories used by the people in what is now Essex and Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire, the London area and probably south of the Thames too.
00:51:37
Speaker
because the Canty people seem to be paying tribute to those north of the river and therefore kind of under them, I suppose, in the society structure.
Balancing Myth with Historical Fact
00:51:55
Speaker
So, they are their stories that they tell about their past. And they're very, very keen on this Brutus story, as I mentioned before, because they feel that it puts them on a level with the Romans.
00:52:11
Speaker
So it's also, these stories are hugely influenced by the fact that they've already had contact with the Romans. So probably, although elements of this story are older than the middle of the first century BC,
00:52:26
Speaker
that they are, it seems to be that's when they're crystallized at that point, so that these new people, these Romans who are coming over and taking over most of Europe and eventually will take Britain as a vassal kingdom, or a set of vassal kingdoms.
00:52:48
Speaker
We're not being taken over by them, actually. That's what the Britons say. We are in partnership with the Romans because we are descended from the same people and that's how they justify it to themselves, I guess.
00:53:06
Speaker
So that's quite interesting if we can tell those stories. But what I would be interested in is how to make that clear that it is just a story and not the truth about where the Britons came from when we talk to children.
00:53:26
Speaker
and I often come out of character and I will say that quite clearly that this is a myth, legend of the Iron Age people but I know that many of my colleagues would like to stay in character so how do you do that? How do you stay in character and say this is a myth of my people? Unless your character is naturally sceptical about everything and a bit of a cynic and then you can say, you know, my people say this story but I don't think that's true. I suppose that's one way of doing it.
00:53:58
Speaker
So, but does it really matter? Does it really matter to actually have these stories, tell the stories? So the children are going to remember all of the details anyway, for one thing. And for another thing, it does get the fact that we're using stories of the local people is probably much more valuable than the fact that they are propaganda.
Preview of Future Episodes
00:54:25
Speaker
Well, there you go. That's a, it's an idea anyway.
00:54:31
Speaker
Now, in the last five minutes I'm just going to tell you a little bit about what's coming up on the podcast. As I mentioned before, we are going to do a film special. Yay! Now there have been quite a lot of films set in prehistory and some of them are better than others.
00:54:51
Speaker
We're going to have to narrow it down so that we don't take in every single film. But what I want to think about, and I'm going to talk to two guests, Alice O'Mahoney from York University and Penelope Foreman who's studying for her PhD at Bournemouth University. And we're all film buffs. We're all really interested in that stuff.
00:55:15
Speaker
And I like to watch all of these prehistoric films just to laugh at them or to think, actually, do you know what? That's a pretty good idea. As you know, I do the same thing with reading books set in prehistory too. Quite a lot of them are laughable, but there are also some really amazing ones that make you think differently about the research that you're doing. That's amazing.
00:55:41
Speaker
So, we are going to look at 1 million years BC. We are. I know what you're thinking. But you know, apart from the dinosaurs, it's got some interesting ideas to discuss in that, I think, about whether life was nasty brutition short or the emergence of altruism and helping each other. And of course,
00:56:07
Speaker
leopard skin bikinis. We can talk about clothing over that time as well so that should be good. But we can contrast this with Clan of the Cave Bear, the Daryl Hannah film from the early 80s. Now I don't like to admit this so I won't say it very loud but I haven't actually seen it.
00:56:29
Speaker
I know. I'm going to have to watch it before we record the next podcast so that I can think about that. And what will be really interesting is to see how different it is from the book. But I can't believe that I haven't seen it after all these, you know, it's been out for years.
00:56:48
Speaker
But there are a couple of other films. There was that funny film a few years ago, 10,000 BC, that was, I think it started out well and it went really strange. I'm going to have to remind myself about that. And then there's also a film that was recommended to me by one of my previous podcast guests, Jan Friedman,
00:57:11
Speaker
And he lent it to me, and this is called Au, the last Neanderthal, I think, or the last hunter. And that's really interesting, it's a French film, but there's not a lot of language in it generally anyway, so it doesn't really matter. So I think that's going to be really interesting to talk to my guests about.
00:57:31
Speaker
Now, after that, I'm going to do another one on film. Well, but it's based on a book. So I'm talking to a regular guest on my podcast, Matthew Pope, about the book Quest for Fire, which was originally written in French, translated into English and then made into a film as well, starring Ron Perlman with very little makeup, actually.
00:57:56
Speaker
as you know with Ron Perlman, he kind of has quite a few vestiges of that early hominin look. So we can contrast the book and the film which are actually quite different and it's quite interesting to see what choices the filmmakers took
00:58:18
Speaker
to make the different human groups all different and to see what level of language and cooperation and things like that that they had and technology.
00:58:32
Speaker
and Matthew Pope from University College London is a great person to talk about that with so that should be really really good. Now if you have any suggestions for films or books or graphic novels or poems or any other anything that's surrounding the topic of fiction set in prehistory whether that may be written in prehistory or not of course prehistory itself is
00:59:03
Speaker
supposedly devoid of writing. But after what Miles Russell has said about the stories that Geoffrey of Monmouth based his book on, perhaps one day some scrolls or something of the Rosetta Stone of Britain will be found that proves that these stories were based on stories that people told and possibly wrote down.
00:59:33
Speaker
in prehistory.
01:00:01
Speaker
Bye!