10 Facts about Iron Age Britain

Don’t you just hate it when you’re at a party and everyone’s talking about the Iron Age and you don’t have any interesting things to say about it? Well fear no more because here’s 10 interesting facts about our ancient ancestors from Iron Age Britain that’ll make you super interesting.

1) The Iron Age ended in 43 AD, or did it?

The Iron Age started around 800 BCE and officially ended during the year 43 AD when the Romans came to Britain. The reason it officially ended in 43 AD is because the knowledge to make steel arrived in Britain and opened a new era of stronger metals and technologies, but this wouldn’t exactly be true. The Romans landed in the south and did indeed bring steel with them, but it would take many years for them to share the technology of how to make it with all of Britain. Parts of Scotland stayed in the Iron Age for up to 400 years after the technology of how to make steel arrived in the country because the Romans weren’t able to conquer it.

2) People in the Iron Age liked to show off

In a time when there’s no such things as electronics or flashy cars, how do you show everyone how rich you are? The answer would be to do a huge amount of digging. Sure they had status symbols like gold torcs and jewelry, but if you wanted people looking at your home to know you were wealthy, the best way would be to surround it with an earthen mound. Many very small settlements and single homes were often surrounded with an earthen mound wall, something often mistaken for a defensive structure. They did build such walls for defense purposes on the larger settlements, but on a small home having such a wall would be impossible to defend from all sides with only a couple of people. The bigger the wall the more money it would cost to build, making you look richer and more important than your neighbours who live 5 miles away.

(Earthen mounds surrounding large settlements were built as a defense, but on smaller hamlets or single homes they were purely for show)

3) They weren’t as dirty as you’d think

A bad smell is the same to everyone, and to think that people would sweat away in the crop fields all day and then cram into a tiny house without any problems isn’t realistic. They made soap out of animal fats and wood ash and washed their clothes on a regular basis. This was obviously less frequent than people would wash today, probably due to the effort of heating the water and doing everything by hand instead of just throwing it into a machine, but fragments of soap have been found at Iron Age digs across the whole British Isles.

(Blocks of soap made from animal fat and wood ash. Flowers or sented oils would be mixed in to provide a nice smell)

4) They were physically very fit and strong

The biggest let down of people living during this age was their limited diet and lack of medicine, but in terms of physical fitness and strength, they put the average modern human to shame. Food for you is simply a quick trip to the shops, but 2000 years ago it meant hacking away at the soil for hours on end to prepare a crop, or running after a deer for miles several times a week. Skeletons discovered from the Iron Age show them to be in remarkably good shape in terms of estimated muscle mass, with their biggest let-down being the limited variety of foods they had available

5) No one knew how to read or write

There are many civilizations from the Iron Age that didn’t have a written language, but most of them at least had some kind of rune system or symbols representing things, but not Iron Age Britain. There was no written language of any kind across the whole of the British Isles before the Romans arrived, leaving everything we know about them to be discovered from their remains and the items they left behind.

6) The population of Britain passed 1 million for the first time

For most of the Iron Age the population of Britain remained in the higher hundred thousands, but towards the end when the Romans arrived its believed to have just tipped passed the 1 million mark. We know this from surviving records the Romans made during the early years of their invasion and the increased build rate of native settlements.

7) The single most important invention of the entire era was……. the Plow

Before the Iron Age was the Bronze Age, a metal that’s made by combining tin and copper to form an alloy stronger than either metal alone, but not strong enough to drag through hard ground to turn up the soil. Iron allowed plows to be dragged through ground that would bend bronze in seconds, which gave them the ability to mass produce grain. One man on a plow pulled by an ox could do the work of 50 people in the same amount of time, freeing others up to produce even more food. This increase in food allowed them to support larger populations, and if it wasn’t for iron, the population of the British Isles would have increased much slower.

(A re-creation of a plow in the same design as ones found from Iron Age digs)

8) They didn’t have any kind of medicine

During the Iron Age people didn’t even know what germs were, they only knew wounds could become infected and sickness could kill people, but they had no idea as to why exactly. Medicine during this age was mostly down to luck and guess work, with treatments involving getting people to drink herbal concoctions that the local shaman made from things he found in the woods. In terms of what we would now consider to be actual medicine, the people of Iron Age Britain had literally nothing.

9) Iron, tin and copper weren’t the only metals they had

It is known as the Iron Age because it was the strongest and most significant metal they had access to. Copper and tin were still used separately or made into bronze, but they had access to a selection of other metals they used in a variety of ways. Lead, zinc and silver would have showed up around the landscape and all have a lower melting temperature than iron, meaning they had the ability to smelt and smith them. We know that silver was used in jewelry and to decorate weapons and items, but how they would have found a use for other metals is anyone’s guess. Zinc has been found within the blades of weapons recovered from archeological digs, but whether they put it in on purpose or whether it was already in the ore is unknown.

10) They didn’t use money

The first coins minted in Britain are from around the year 100 BCE, but they were the currency of single kingdoms and no nationally recognized form of coinage was used. Trade was done by swapping goods and people were often paid in food or metals. Hiring someone to build you a house would require having a large amount of grain, skins or metals to pay them with at the end, because if someone did have coins, they were usually only seen for the value of their metal weight.