What was life like during the Iron Age?
The Iron Age in Britain ran from around 800 BCE until the Roman invasion in 43 AD, though it took around 40 years for the Romans to conquer the country and spread their technology of how to make steel. Before they turned up the country was divided into a number of smaller kingdoms or independent town states that governed themselves. We will never truly know what life was like back in the Iron Age but the huge amount of archeological digs and research into the subject gives us a good idea.
Here are a few of the roles people would have played back in the Iron Age and just how difficult it would have been to stay alive.
Farmer
This would have been the most common job in the country as farm work was done by hand and took a very long time. The single most important invention during this age was the iron plow, a device previously unavailable as bronze simply didn’t have the strength to be dragged through the ground without quickly breaking. The mass production of grain meant that all the food they needed for the winter could be produced during the summer, and they would no longer be forced to depend on hunting and fishing, but all this work came at a heavy labor cost.
A typical day for an Iron Age farmer
Starting as soon as it got light enough to see, the farmer would put on his linen trousers and shirt along with either a wool or leather over-shirt for warmth. A breakfast of boiled grain, vegetables, fish, or a small piece of meat would be eaten along with a glass of milk, water, or ale. Heading outside the farmer would get straight into the field and spend the entire day hacking away at the soil to get it ready for planting, or depending on the stage of the crops would spend the day crouched down pulling vegetables out of the ground or removing peas from their pods with his bare hands. Farming would take all day and be a constant job from dawn until dusk with the exception of winter where each day would be spent tending the animals and sitting inside with nothing to do other than drink ale and talk to other people.
Blacksmith
The reason that the Iron Age didn’t start until 800 BCE was that no one could work out how to melt iron until then. Bronze can be made by combining tin and copper, both of which have reasonably low melting temperatures, but iron takes a much hotter fire. To melt iron a bloomery smelter would be made and filled with layers of charcoal and iron, or iron sand which is simply a form of sand with a high concentration of iron. The smelting process can take hours and would require a bellows to be constantly operated by some unlucky villager. After iron runs out the smithing process can begin which took many times longer than it does today. When iron is first produced it’s known as something called pig iron which has a very high carbon content making it extremely brittle, something that smelting it again in a different type of furnace would remove.
Since they didn’t have any other type of furnace they were forced to remove the carbon by hitting it with a hammer thousands of times. The iron would come out of the smelter in one large blob and immediately be put onto a tree stump or anvil and hammered over and over to bash out all the carbon and make it pure enough to have decent strength.
A typical day for an Iron Age blacksmith
Starting the second it got light the same clothes as everyone else would be put on, but this time with the addition of a leather apron. Breakfast may be a little better for the blacksmith since it was a job that paid more than farming and because trade was still the primary currency he would often be paid in food and other goods. The rest of the day would be spent either powering the bellows and making charcoal or hammering constantly on a clump of iron to make it strong enough to work with.
Iron Age tools and weapons were reasonably simple but due to the impurity of the iron and the fact they had to hammer the carbon out, it would require much more time and effort. It could take a skilled smith as long as one week to make a single sword from scratch, a process today that would take a few hours.
Doctor
The term doctor didn’t come around until much later and people who dealt with injuries and illnesses were referred to as healers. Since no one knew what germs were during this age, healing people would have been a combination of luck and guesswork. The various gods they worshiped would have been prayed to for help with healing someone and if a person died during treatment they would probably consider it a sign.
A typical day for an Iron Age healer
The day would be spent gathering herbs from the forest, mixing them into various potions and drying them for later use. Since they couldn’t do anything more than give someone a slight vitamin boost before they died each healer would have their own recipes of what “works” for them. If you treat someone and they happen to recover then you’d consider a particular mixture as medicine and administer it in the future. There would have been a heavy religious aspect to the job of healer and praying to the gods and making offerings would be a frequent activity.
Warrior
During the Iron Age, few settlements had dedicated soldiers and instead used trained villagers. Since many settlements were independent they needed to protect themselves because if the village falls then it would be your home that gets burned and your family that gets hurt. This gave people the motivation to fight whenever they had to and a warrior would be anyone willing and able to hold a spear or bow. A person standing guard on the walls one day could be harvesting grain the next and would unlikely be a dedicated fighter for the whole year.
A typical day for an Iron Age warrior
The same clothes as everyone else wore would be put on but with the addition of a leather shirt or helmet for protection. Iron Age warriors often didn’t wear any armor at all and the Celts often fought completely naked except for their boots. This is the kind of job where nothing happens for a long time and then everything comes at once, making it either really boring or life threatening. From the Iron Age until the late medieval age people actually had fighting seasons which ran from spring until late summer. Fighting in the winter wasn’t practical and required an army to be moved in freezing temperatures with no wild food and hibernating animals hidden away, making it way too risky to move so many people with nothing but grain to eat in such low temperatures.
Hunter
One of the most respected jobs during the Iron Age, the hunter would be seen as a hero returning with a large deer to feed the village, or a failure if he didn’t. Hunting would have been done all year round and wasn’t as simple as going into the local woodlands each time. Bows would be the primary hunting tool because it normally isn’t possible to get close enough to large game to throw a spear with the exception of a boar who sometimes charge their attacker. Small game like hares and squirrels could be found easily but the larger game like deer would migrate and sometimes move miles away.
A typical day for an Iron Age hunter
A hunting trip would sometimes take days and the hunter would have to prepare for this accordingly. Taking along some food, clothing and something to sleep under would be bundled into a makeshift backpack and the hunter would head out into the wild. If a goat was the intended target then it would be a trip into the mountains, but boar and deer would require a long walk into the forest or open plains.
Hunting is never guaranteed and if you didn’t find anything in one place or missed a shot you’d simply go further. After catching something it would be too heavy to take back whole and there would be a good amount of unusable weight like bones and inedible organs. A butchering session would take place and the liver or kidneys would be eaten by the hunter by being placed straight onto the hot ash of a fire. Someone on a hunt may get lucky and catch something right away, or it may take days of walking around a mountain range in the rain before having to carry 40 kg of raw meat in a bag ten miles back to your village.
General Iron Age life
- Clothes would have been mostly made from linen because flax was the only fabric-bearing crop they could mass produce. Wool and leather would be used for warmth or protective outer layers but linen would be the dominant material by far.
- During the Iron Age in Britain, there were no Rabbits, radishes, potatoes, turnips, walnuts, grapes, asparagus, shallots, celery, and a very small variety of chickens and ducks.
- Currency during the Iron Age would mostly have been done by trading goods, but some large Celtic kingdoms made their own coins which were only valid for their face value within the kingdom itself and were only worth the weight of the metal elsewhere. The first coins weren’t made until around 100 BC and only lasted about 150 years before the Romans took over.
- Shoes were made from several layers of leather stitched together to form a thick sole, then leather would be stitched round to form the foot covering.
- The Iron Age ended in 43 AD when the Romans invaded and brought with them the technology to make steel, but it took almost 40 years for the technology to spread across England and Wales.
- The Iron Age in Scotland ended around 400 years later than it did in the rest of the British Isles because the Romans couldn’t conquer it, and so weren’t able to share their knowledge of how to make it.
