Introduction
The Middle Bronze Age, 2000-1250 BC
Once farming had become the usual way of life in Britain more woodland was cleared and more farms and hamlets developed. From about 1400 BC, very little of the original woodland was left and farmers began to divide up the landscape into field systems. Most houses were quite flimsy because until about 1200 BC, the climate was much warmer than today – it was more like that of southern Spain.
In some parts of Southern Britain, small farming hamlets with fields laid out around them are known to have developed from about 1400 BC. A settlement site of around 700 BC has been discovered at Turnford, near Broxbourne in South-East Hertfordshire, but no living sites of this period are yet known in North Hertfordshire.
Around this time, burial practices changed from placing the body under a mound to cremating the body and often putting it in a pottery vessel called an urn. Wealthier people would still have their ashes placed under a round barrow, but the urns of poorer people were simply placed in a hole in the ground; sometimes, just the ashes were put into the pit. The most common style of urn is called a ‘collared urn’ because of the thick collar around the rim.
During the Middle Bronze Age, bronze tools and weapons became more common. A greater range of items of more complicated shapes were made as new techniques of casting were developed. Swords, spearheads, new types of axes, chisels, sickles, razors and pins were among the new types of items made. Such items are often found in hoards, some of them left by travelling bronzesmiths or traders. Bronze may also have been traded in the form of ingots.
The Late Bronze Age, 1250-800 BC
After about 1250 BC, the climate got cooler and wetter. People living on higher ground had to abandon their farms, as they could no longer grow crops there and the land turned into moorland. This happened in places like Dartmoor and the Pennines, which had previously been fertile farming landscapes. Elsewhere, people were drawn to wet places, such as ponds, rivers and marshes. They threw in all sorts of valuable metalwork, perhaps hoping to please the water gods.
Around this time, the first fortifications are found, often on the tops of hills, which is why they are referred to as hillforts. It is possible that they were built as a result of unsettled conditions as refugees from the higher ground moved into the lowlands; some may have been built by local people to protect themselves from the strangers while others may have been built by the refugees themselves, as a protection from hostile locals.
Other things began to change. People no longer buried the wealthy dead under round barrows. Instead, everyone was buried in flat cemeteries called urnfields using urns that were larger but plainer than before, called ‘bucket urns’.
New types of bronze weapons and tools were developed as casting techniques became more sophisticated. Socketed axes and spears were first made at this time.
Local evidence
The Middle Bronze Age
There must originally have been several hundred round barrows in North Hertfordshire. Many have been flattened by ploughing or erosion, so that fewer than thirty still exist as mounds. Many of the ditches which surrounded the barrows can still be seen in aerial photographs as rings of different-coloured soil, called ring ditches. More than a hundred ring ditches are known in North Hertfordshire.
Around the long barrow on Therfield Heath is a group of round barrows that can still be seen, many of which excavated in the nineteenth century. Several were found to cover burials of cremated bones in pottery urns and some had several pottery vessels with them. A group a bronze ingots was also found with one of the burials, probably indicating the wealth of the dead individual.
At Cumberlow Green, Rushden, a founder’s (bronzeworker’s) hoard of 40 items (including axes, swords and scrap metal) was found in the nineteenth century. Several other single items of bronze have been found in North Hertfordshire, for instance at Pirton, Letchworth and Baldock.
The Late Bronze Age
Shimon Applebaum’s excavations at the hillfort of Wilbury in Letchworth Garden City in the 1930s found traces of a palisaded enclosure that was earlier than the hillfort proper. Enclosures of this sort often belong to the very late Bronze Age, but his excavations found nothing by which it could be dated.
Three bucket urns were found at William in 1923 and were probably part of a larger urnfield. Such burial grounds are usually only found by chance, as they leave no traces above ground and are difficult to detect on aerial photographs, so there are probably many more across North Hertfordshire.
Several socketed bronze axes, a spearhead and other items, probably from a hoard, were found near Wilbury Hill, Letchworth, early in the twentieth century, while a large hoard was found in Barkway in the 1990s. Metal detectorists are responsible for discovering a great deal of this material.