Goods people in the Iron Age didn’t have
Eating foods like potatoes and having cotton sheets on your bed is something we all take for granted now, with exotic foreign goods available at the press of a button and on your doorstep within days from the other side of the world. During the Iron Age, there was no such thing as global trade and everyone had to make do with what they could produce for themselves, and if you couldn’t grow, gather, or hunt it, then you simply went without. Here are some common goods used in Britain that people didn’t know existed during the Iron Age.
Steel
Starting with the most obvious one, the Iron Age started around 800 BC and ended in 43 AD when the Romans arrived and brought with them the knowledge of how to make steel. This new metal was actually made from iron produced differently and has a different carbon content, effectively converting it into a whole new metal. Steel weapons and farming tools were significantly stronger and lasted much longer than iron, allowing for a whole new range of equipment to be made.
Rabbits
Another import by the Romans. After they conquered England and Wales they introduced rabbits into the country as a wild food source because they bred so quickly and didn’t need to be looked after.
Tea and Coffee
Both of these crops are warm weather crops and Britain simply doesn’t have the climate for them. They may have made something similar made from brewed herbs but actual tea and coffee came later during the 1500s onwards when colonial trade came to the world.
Cauliflower
This vegetable arrived from Cyprus during the late 1600s and quickly became popular in the country, though it’s unknown which genius decided to cook it with cheese sauce.
Cotton and Silk
Cotton is a hot weather crop and needs long hours of sun to flourish, something the British Isles lack. As for silk, the worms themselves can survive in the British climate but the white mulberry leaves they eat don’t naturally grow here. These products didn’t start coming into the country through trade until the mid-1600s.
Peacocks, Pheasants and Guinea fowl
Game birds introduced by the Romans to satisfy their love of hunting.
Vegetables
Onions, Shallots, Endives, Cabbage, leeks, Marrows, Parsnips, Turnips, Lettuce, Celery, Asparagus, Radishes, Artichokes, and cucumbers all arrived after the end of the Iron Age, mostly thanks to the Romans.
Fruit and nuts
Walnuts, Sweet chestnuts, Figs, Medlars, Mulberries, Plums, Cherries, Grapes and Damsons.
Flavorings
Cinnamon, chillis, vanilla, garlic, thyme, basil, peppers, and peppercorn.
Animal Breeds
Today Britain’s river system is plagued by American Signal crayfish which are larger and kill our native white-clawed crayfish, and this is only a single example of the impact foreign species have on our ecosystem. Grey squirrels have decimated our native red squirrel population, and the most common breed of geese in the country is Canadian. Deer, Duck, Chicken, fish, pig, goats, and sheep have all had major breed introductions into Britain after the Iron Age, with almost every single common farm animal today being of a non-native or mixed breed.
Paved Roads
Roads did exist for certain, but they were nothing more than packed down strips of bare earth that were formed by people walking over them for years. It wasn’t until the Romans conquered the country that the first paved roads were seen in Britain.
Aluminum, Titanium, Pewter etc…
It would be much quicker to list the metals they did have rather than the ones they didn’t, so here they are: Copper, Tin, Bronze, Iron, and Lead. It’s likely they would have found traces of metals like mercury but didn’t have a use for them and there are no records of mercury being found in Iron Age British digs. Weapons and metalworks have been found to be made with traces of other metals like Zinc, but they wouldn’t have known it was in there and didn’t use it independently.
Rubber
The trees that produce this don’t grow anywhere near Britain, leaving people to line the bottom of their shoes with layers of leather instead.
