Note 1042 — Chapter V

See p. 267, infra. Caesar’s statement, that the Britons imported copper or bronze (aere utuntur importato [B. G., v, 12, § 4]), has always been a puzzle. I doubt whether any scholar would now infer from it that the cakes of copper which have been found in bronze-founders’ hoards were of foreign origin; but it has been suggested (Guide to the Ant. of the Early Iron Age [Brit. Museum], p. 86) that Caesar may have referred to articles of foreign manufacture such as the bronze flagon mentioned on p. 246, supra. See also J. Evans, Anc. Bronze Implements, p. 419.

M. S. Reinach (Rev. celt., xxi, 1900, p. 173) infers from Caesar’s observation that ‘the industrial activity to which the relics of the Bronze Age testify had long ceased’, and that there was an arrest, or rather a recoil of civilization. But, as we shall see hereafter (p. 267), the culture of the Bronze Age persisted in certain parts of Britain until the Roman conquest. Were the bronze implements that were used in those parts imported? If so, how could they have been paid for without industrial activity; and what conceivable reason can be suggested for the assumed paralysis? The industrial activity of the Early Iron Age in Britain is unquestionable; and I doubt whether any theory could be framed to account for a cessation, contemporaneous with the manufacture of iron, of the trade of the bronze-founder.