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Britain Before the Romans

Commercial intercourse between England and the Continent seems to have existed in some form at a very early period, long before the Phoenicians learned of the Cornish tin mines. The earliest inhabitants of whom traces have been found on the island were in that stage of civilization that we call the Stone Age: they were Stone Workers, so called because they made Flint their implements. tools and weapons chiefly of stone, though wood and bone were also largely used. In the later period of the Stone Age the New Stone Workers developed considerable skill in grinding the rough flint on a granite slab with a little moist gravel thrown on the granite surface to make the grinding easier. It was a slow process, but six or eight hours of grinding every day for a week would produce a fairly good ax of the desired form and finish.

As good flint did not exist everywhere in Europe, it seems possible that there was a somewhat brisk trade in this commodity, at least in the later Stone Age. It is also likely that something like a flint industry may have been developed where the materials were plentiful, as for instance in Denmark. Some of these manufactured flint implements may have found their way to Britain. But the British Stone Men also had a native source of supply in the southeastern part of the island, which was doubtless distributed by commercial methods to the other parts of Britain.

The Stone Men were succeeded in the island by the Bronze Workers, a race that learned the art of making implements from a composition of copper and tin. There seem to have been several migrations of bronze-using people from the Continent to Britain. The people that the European travelers encountered on the British Isles at the dawn of British history, more than two thousand years ago, were called Celts; they had by that time learned to work in iron, but it is likely that the Celtic tribes that first came to Britain were still in the bronze age. The Highlanders of Scotland, the Irish, and the inhabitants of Wales and Cornwall are chiefly of Celtic blood, the descendants of these prehistoric workers in bronze and iron. The Celts who occupied the southern and larger part of Great Britain were known as Brythons, hence the terms Briton and Britain.

It was the commercial possibilities of Great Britain that first attracted the attention of the Mediterranean merchants to this northern country. The bronze-smiths needed the tin that the streams of Cornwall laid bare; and Phoenician traders from Spain and Carthage appear to have sought this commodity in Britain at a very early date. Toward the close of the fourth century BC they seem to have found competitors in the Greeks from the Hellenic city of Massilia (Marseilles) in southern Gaul. In the days of Alexander the Great the merchants of that city sent an expedition to the "Pretanic Isles" headed by a Greek scientist, Pytheas by name. It is likely that the visit of Pytheas did much to stimulate the overland trade between the Channel and the Mediterranean by way of the great valleys of the Seine and the Rhone. On his return Pytheas wrote an elaborate report of his journey, parts of which have come down to us and serve as the earliest literary source for the history of Britain.