The day-to-day lives of Iron Age people

Since Iron Age Britons didn’t write anything down, mostly because they didn’t have a written language, there aren’t any details of what people would have done during their normal day-to-day lives. Thanks to dedicated historians and archaeologists we have been able to form a reasonable assumption of what the average day would have been like during those times.

Here are a few of the most common jobs and the typical daily activities for people living in the Iron Age and how hard it would have been to survive there:

Farmer:

Life as a farmer would have been the most labor-intensive job you could possibly do. If your settlement was lucky you’d have a small iron plow pulled by an ox, which although didn’t make things easy certainly would have sped up certain tasks.

Constant back-breaking work would be normal every day, with low-quality iron tools that break easily and everything having to be done by hand. Work in the field wouldn’t be the only task of a farmer, with the processing of their crops taking up just as much time as farming. Linen was grown to make oil and fibers for weaving into cloth, and pulling countless thousands of linen strands off a stem from dawn till dusk would hurt your hands as much as field work hurt your back.

Farming had to be done no matter the weather, and without rubber or plastic, the only waterproof option you had would be leather, which is very hot and heavy. Squashing about in the mud with the water seeping through your cloth boots so you can pull plants out of the ground with your bare hands would be a normal day in the life of an iron-age farmer. Everyone was expected to help when needed, and people who worked as soldiers would often find themselves in the fields to help bring in a harvest or process a load of grain.

Hunter:

The job of the hunter is normally seen as the most glamorous and important position for someone in the Iron Age, with images of heroic warriors killing a giant bear and saving the village from starvation. In reality, the Iron Age made huge advances in farming, and grain was relied on much heavier than hunting was.

Using bows and spears a hunter would often have to walk many miles to find something large to hunt like deer or boar, and often the initial shot from a bow wouldn’t kill, but rather cause a bleeding wound the hunter could follow until the animal died. A 500-pound deer is difficult to kill in a single shot with an Iron Age quality bow, and the second it gets hit it’s going to run much faster than any human could.

If the creature could be successfully tracked to the point it bled out and died, then the next few hours would be spent getting covered in blood and guts butchering the animal. The next stage would be to walk back to the settlement with 30kg of raw deer meat on your back, only to drop it off so you can go and get the rest.

After the initial pride of feeding the village wore off, life would consist of walking several miles to shoot something, then running several miles until it died, then getting covered in animal guts before walking all the way back carrying a huge amount of weight. Hunters had better lives than farmers and also had the chance to eat extra things they caught or found in the wilderness, but it would be a very dangerous and exhausting line of work.

Builder:

Iron Age buildings consisted of small stone walls with a wooden thatched roof, and since they hadn’t discovered the same type of mortar used in building castles yet, stone couldn’t be built very high. Building walls would involve stacking stone packed with clay in between to hold it together and cutting beams to lay walls and roofs. It was probably one of the better jobs of the time as the stones used were normally quite small and there wasn’t any hard labor involved other than general lifting.

(A team of 5 could build a roundhouse in just a few days, and that’s with gathering and cutting all the materials)

That’s not to say it would have been a glamorous job, as making a daub would have involved taking off your shoes and stomping clay, mud, and straw together with your bare feet to make a putty to cover walls with. It was also one of the more dangerous jobs and had periods of hard work that was worse than working on a farm, like digging the ditch fortifications so often seen around hill forts.

Brewer:

Probably one of the best jobs you could do, with all the work taking place in one location and no heavy lifting involved. Since the process of brewing is done in stages there would have been a lot of downtime on this job, most likely filled by making barrels or some other job around the village.

This position was much more important than just getting people drunk as people used to brew weak ale to drink instead of water, as the alcohol ensured it wouldn’t go bad like water can.

Tanner:

This job would be very tough on the hands, but otherwise quite laid back. It was a tanner’s job to process all of the skins the hunting parties brought in so they could be made into clothing and other leather goods. The skins would have been cured using tannins, a type of oil plants naturally produce as a preservative and to make their skins waterproof. Acorns would most likely have been the tannins of choice as they contain a huge amount of tannins and would have been easy to gather in mass.

(A pair of ancient boots recovered from a dig, made in the fashion of boiling and stretching the leather)

If you grab a few acorns, crush them up a little, and put them in some water, it will turn a murky yellow color after a couple of days. This is all the tannins leaking out in a form that can be easily collected. Skins would be dried and stretched before being boiled in tannin water before once more being stretched and dried.

When a skin has been cured it’s far too tough to make clothing from right away and so must be softened. A process that involves constantly scrunching the leather round until it goes soft, a task that would take hours per skin. If acorns weren’t available then other substances could be used. An early form of leather was made from boiling the animal skins in urine before drying and stretching them out.

Forager:

Lots of walking and lots of wading through brambles and nettles to find things to eat, then gathering it with your bare hands and a simple iron knife before walking all the way back, several times a day.

It would have been one of the better jobs as apart from walking there wasn’t really any intense labor involved, and I would personally rather be pulling berries off a bush all day than hacking away at wheat with a sickle or carrying bleeding meat 5 miles back to the village.